


the chosen fruit

by theformerone



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Drama, Exhibitionism, F/M, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Non Uchiha Massacre AU, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Politics, Sex Work, Undercover Missions, Uzushiogakure exists AU, Voyeurism, this is all indirectly mako's fault
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-30
Updated: 2019-01-15
Packaged: 2019-04-14 20:26:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 8
Words: 39,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14143890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theformerone/pseuds/theformerone
Summary: Sakura is a rōnin, but she's good enough with a blade to find work. She's trusted at Fukiage because she's a nameless woman who can't afford to bite any hand that feeds her.Shikamaru's awful attitude makes him a favorite in the teahouse. He makes his money on his back but his real trade is information. There is rot in Fire Country. Shikamaru sees it, and he is going to burn it at the roots.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [the snow is bleeding red](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12728148) by [amako](https://archiveofourown.org/users/amako/pseuds/amako). 



> title lifted from Centuries by Fall Out Boy
> 
> yeah this is an extension of the pretty boy 'verse (the one where sakura's posing as a samurai and shikamaru is a kagema) because ???? i just really loved this entire thing. so here it is. for some reason. and ALL of this was inspired by amako's 'the snow bleeding red' and subsequent courtesan art. because she is amazing and so is her work.
> 
> because sakura is sakura and shikamaru is shikamaru, their false identities don't exist here. i'm just gonna recycle the names because it'll make my life easier as a Writer of Too Many Things.

Hanako eyes her up and down, from the strands of her oddly colored hair, down to her rumpled clothes but pristinely kept twin kodachi. She chews thoughtfully on her pipe, blowing plumes of thick smoke out of her nose as she does. 

"Those all you can use?" she croaks. 

Sakura shakes her head. 

"I'm proficient with kunai as well," she says. "The bow and arrow, as well."

Hanako nods slowly, wisely. Sakura keeps still, aware that she's being sized up. 

It wouldn't be the first place that's turned her away. Warrior women are looked at with wary eyes outside of the hidden villages. They're in samurai country; unless she's wed to a samurai, she has no place wielding their weapons like she's one of them. 

Yet here she is, pink haired, armed to the teeth, and dressed as plainly as her station will allow. She had been cast out for nearly three months, had picked up odd jobs that would sustain her. Mostly had taken to gambling when she could; she had a decent amount of luck, but she needed steady work. 

People didn't want her. Her swords made them turn her away. Her arrows made them lift their eyebrows and scoff. And if that didn't do it, her ridiculous hair color certainly did. She would curse her father for giving it to her if he had not been the one who had fought to keep her in the family, even against his own father's wishes.

Her father had given her the kodachi before she bolted into the night. She had only planned on taking her bow and quiver with her, but her father had pressed the two scabbards into her hands and told her to go without fighting him. 

She had wandered. Given a wide berth because of her weaponry and because of her strangeness. She had walked for days. Offered her services as a bookkeeper or a washer woman. She could set her hands to any available task, if only someone would let her. She would take shelter or meals instead of pay. 

It had all landed her here. 

"Won't be much need for the bow," Hanako says, smoke from her pipe stinging Sakura's eyes. Still, she does not blink. "Unless you can hunt. Can you hunt?"

Sakura can put an arrow in a man's eye from across a battlefield. Her arrows fly as fast as any hawk this side of Konohagakure. If she wants to kill something, she can kill it.

"Yes, ma'am, I can."

"And those knives of yours," Hanako continues, voice creaking and hard. "You can keep them hidden on your person?"

There are nine up her sleeves right now. Hanako's men had disarmed her for the most part. She had let them think she had removed all of the kunai by giving them the holster she had attached to her thigh. But the knives in her sleeves weighed them down, their cool metal pressing sweetly into the soft, scar speckled skin of Sakura's arms. 

"Yes, ma'am, I can."

There's one man in the room. Grizzly bearded and experienced. Old enough to be one of Sakura's uncles, her mother's brothers. If she remembers properly, his name is Rokuro. And the one outside who had her bow and quiver was Yoshiaki. 

He had tried to take her kodachi when she entered the teahouse. Sakura barely had time to refuse. There was plenty of outside work that people would let her do without disarming herself so. If whoever ran this teahouse wanted an armed guard but not one who would enter her property armed, let her be a hypocrite in peace. 

Rokuro had known better. Had looked at Sakura, really looked at her plain clothes and her many weapons. She still isn't sure how he did, but he understood.

Besides, it wasn't business hours. It was much too early in the day. The boys and girls were all asleep, tucked away with another guard standing sentinel at the stairs. What good (or harm) could one pink haired girl do against an old woman like Hanako, even armed as she was? 

Rokuro let her pass, and Sakura was grateful for it. 

"I'll take you for a week," the old woman says. 

A cough interrupts her, one of her own. It rattles in Hanako's chest, deep and almost violent. A hacking cough, one that will probably take her life, if it hasn't already tried. From the look of her, Hanako is the kind of woman who such coughs balk at. 

"A week," Hanako continues once she catches her breath. "To see how you fit with the boys. You'll have meals and a bedroom, though a simple one. Once I'm sure you're not the awful type, we'll see about pay."

Sakura doesn't need to wonder about what 'the awful type' means. Fukiage was a mixed teahouse. Those who protected it couldn't damage the merchandise. It gave Sakura a week to be on her best behavior, though she doubted she would have even displayed anything bad for Hanako or her men to see. A week's worth of food and a bed to sleep in was more than she had gotten from anyone else. 

Things must have been tight at Fukiage, if Hanako were offering a strange and armed girl such accommodations. It's something Sakura notices, but pays little attention to. She's got an odd appearance; she's noticed that word of her will travel ahead of where she plans to stay and eke out a living next. 

She had asked around in the town around dawn, if there was anyone looking for an extra pair of hands for work of any kind. Some people had looked at her like she was crazy. Others ignored her. A couple gave her directions towards the flower district.

Sakura had swallowed her pride. It had - it had stung to have someone tell her that she ought to work on her back if she was desperate enough to ask random townsfolk if they needed their clothes cleaned for a bowl of miso soup. But that hadn't been what they had meant at all. 

There were flowers in the district that needed protecting. And even if Sakura found no work there, at least the townspeople could have a good laugh at her when she left in shame. 

And maybe they would laugh at her still, now that she had started to nestle herself into the lush gardens that stretched around Fukiage. But at least she'd go to sleep with her stomach full, and she wouldn't have to rise before the sun did to start walking before she overstayed her welcome. At least she wasn't sleeping in barns, or underneath trees. 

At least she was only named after a flower, and wasn't one of them herself. 

"Alright, Sakura-kun," Hanako says, her easy voice not even tripping over Sakura's lack of surname.

It stings in a way that it shouldn't. She's been nameless for months now. It shouldn't matter to her that she belongs to no one. No one except for herself at least. 

Hanako gives her a grin, tipping out the ash in her pipe to fill it again with strips of bright green leaves. 

"Welcome to my garden."


	2. Chapter 2

Whispers about the new guard begin as soon as the girls wake up around mid afternoon. They titter wildly, their excitement over the addition to their fold as exuberant as it is because the new rōnin attending Hanako's garden is a woman. 

Shikamaru lets Isamu tell him all about the new guard. Pink haired, green eyed. Dressed simply, with two short swords at her hip. She was on a trial period of a week. She had been introduced to the girls this morning because she was given a bedroll just outside of their quarters. 

"Where does she come from?" Shikamaru asks, tugging the sleeves of his dark green yukata up over his shoulders. He usually likes to let most of the garment pool around his waist, but he's itching for a smoke and he isn't allowed to do so indoors. 

Isamu shrugs, tossing some of her pale brown hair over her shoulder. She eyes the bandages surrounding Shikamaru's middle, aware of what put them there, and why he's being coddled so by being so late to begin dressing. His last customer had indulged in very specific tastes. Ones that had bruised Shikamaru's ribs. Shikamaru sees Isamu eyeing his middle, and he covers himself completely.

"Outside of town," Isamu says, averting her gaze. She reaches into the pocket of her own dressing gown and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. She places one behind Shikamaru's ear, and a second one in his mouth. It's a peace offering, and it's one he's glad to accept. 

"She didn't say where," she continues, "but that's as good an answer as any."

A sword bearing woman that wasn't Konohagakure and wasn't an onna-bugeisha meant someone abandoned. Left to shadow and silence. To wandering, and solitary survival. Shikamaru takes his cigarette from between his lips and rolls it between his fingers with the same dexterity he uses to open up clients or twirl a senbon.

"Wonder why Hanako let her in," Shikamaru muses. 

Isamu shrugs, gathering up her skirts to leave Shikamaru's room. It's obvious he isn't in the mood to play games with her, to trade gossip. She had only come around to give him the news, and he was less receptive to it than she had hoped he'd be. 

"Hanako takes in all types, Shika," Isamu drawls. "You know that."

Shikamaru chuckles and grabs his lighter from the nightstand. He gets up himself, slowly because of his ribs. Isamu comes to help him, and he lets her guide him to standing. 

"You're out for the night, aren't you?" she asks. There's something shuttered, almost jealous and mostly relieved in her gaze. "That's almost a week. You'll fall behind."

Shikamaru scratches the back of his head and pops his cigarette back into his mouth. 

"There are worse things," he replies. "Hanako's not a bad matron. If I'm behind, I'm behind. I'll make it up. I always do."

Isamu scoffs at that, but they both know it's true. 

Shikamaru is a fan favorite at Fukiage. His aristocratic cheekbones and lazy way of moving make him like a still pool; there are plenty of men and women alike keen on throwing their pebbles into his well. 

He's the intelligent type. Razor sharp wit, scathing without being cruel. He's hard to keep up with, which ensures that his clientele are only those who don't think so highly of their intellect that they are hurt when Shikamaru proves smarter than them. 

It takes a couple of hit and misses. Five nights ago was a definite miss. But his hits were absolute. They were grandfather types. Men who had fought in the Shinobi Wars, who wanted to play shogi with him, and talk politics. It was an exercise in subtle masochism; they liked it when he beat them at their own game, spoke circles around them, was clever enough to have won the wars they almost died in. 

When he won their games, eviscerated them in debates, Shikamaru spread his thighs as these men asked the privilege of rewarding his intelligence. Uniformly, they got to their knees, keen on making him come, curious to see what it would take to crack his easy poise. They loved him when he was silent. They loved him more when he moaned. 

War veterans paid well. And despite only having four or five regulars who had to travel from Konohagakure to get to him, Shikamaru made enough money so that he didn't have to worry about being charming enough to pick up new clients. He wasn't in danger the way Isamu and some of the others were, but he also wasn't as comfortable as Sasuke was. It was a balance he was comfortable with. 

Though it would upset Koichi to see the bandages. It would turn his usually sunny disposition stormy. Jin would probably refuse to see him because of them as well. Botan would demand to know who had hurt him and why. Arata would insist on treating him with excessive tenderness, and would probably cry when they fucked. 

And Asuma? Asuma would be sad as well. But it was part of the job. They both knew what Shikamaru was signing up for when he took this assignment on. They weren't the first or the worst injuries he had sustained in the line of duty. They wouldn't be the last. Anything was survivable. Bruised ribs and some scabby love bites wouldn't kill him. 

"You're lucky, Shika," Isamu says, easily helping him out of his room and down the stairs. "You've got a bunch of rich old men fawning over you. If I stopped working for a week, I'd drown."

They both nod politely at Yoshiaki, stationed at the base of the stairs even now. He nods back at them, and they continue on towards the back verandah and the sprawling gardens that cushion Fukiage. 

"You've just gotta find your thing," Shikamaru replies. "Mine is being bored. Sasuke's is being a brat."

Isamu slaps his shoulder at that, eyes narrowed. 

"Don't talk about Sasuke like that," she scolds. "He does his best."

Shikamaru lights his cigarette, and takes a slow drag. 

"I'm sure he does."

Isamu was only one of a handful of people in Fukiage who tittered after Sasuke. The guy only had one client, one who came only a handful of times over the course of the year, and paid handsomely for him to be the only person Sasuke serviced. It left him with plenty of free time to entertain hobbies. But it also left him stranded.

He couldn't pay his way out of Fukiage with a single patron paying to make sure he stayed. Whatever deal his patron had struck up with Hanako, he was pushing a sum so high into the teahouse that it wasn't one Sasuke could buy his own way out of. At least not in this lifetime.  

In a way that nobody else in Fukiage was, Sasuke was stuck. 

"You're in a mood, I can tell," Isamu mutters, sucking at her teeth. 

Shikamaru shrugs, staring out at the gardens. "It's possible."

"You're _i_ _m_ possible," Isamu snips, taking her arm away from Shikamaru. He leans against one of the wooden pillars that connects to the low roof instead. 

"Isamu," he says as she turns to head back upstairs so she can properly begin getting ready for the evening. She turns to look at him, amber eyes glittering prettily in her heart shaped face. 

He lifts his cigarette to her like he's toasting her and smiles. 

"Thanks for the smoke."

Isamu rolls her eyes. 

"Save your charm for your old men, Shika," she says. "It doesn't work on the rest of us."

But she smiles at him as she heads back inside. 

Shikamaru looks out at the garden. It's gorgeous really, all low hanging trees bearing blossoms and fruit in equal measure. Thick green grass and an array of brightly colored flowers of all kinds. It's cultivated primly, but not too primly. It exudes a sense of minute wildness. 

He likes to stand here in the afternoon when the deliveries are being made. The business of the day all happens behind the teahouse. The washer women from the village come to dry out the clothes of the Fukiage flowers. Deliverymen come with food and drink and cigarettes. Craftsmen come with repaired instruments, new fans, new jewelry, or books.

Rokuro oversees it all, taking meticulous notes that will be given to Hanako once the afternoon business is over. At his side is the new guard, a pink haired woman much shorter than him. It isn't saying much, because Rokuro is probably the tallest person Shikamaru has ever met in his life. 

The woman is small, but her bright green eyes are intelligent. She watches the deliveries come in and out, listening to Rokuro as he advises the bustle of activity around them. Yoshiaki is inside, ensuring that the flowers are not propositioned before business hours begin. Nobuyuki is probably out front to take care of the same thing. 

Shikamaru wonders how this new pink haired woman will fit into their fold. Nobu, Rokuro, and Yoshiaki were good men, reasonable men. Rokuro had been there the longest, and was Hanako's right hand. Nobu was second after that, and Yoshiaki the third. They had all been there long before Shikamaru himself arrived at Fukiage. 

The guard that this woman was replacing had been named Shinichi. He had been caught drunk, holding Uyeda down by the throat while his frantic customer screamed for someone to come to their aid. 

No one was keen to blame Uyeda. He was younger by a bit, and the extra money Shinichi was offering would help him. It hadn't been his fault that Shinichi was the possessive type. But Hanako had still halved his pay to take care of his medical expenses and as punishment; his mistake and the crushed windpipe that came with it were going to cost him another handful of years in the teahouse. 

"Rokuro-san," Shikamaru calls, tipping his cigarette's ash off the verandah and into the grass below. "Who's your new friend?"

His voice carries, and Rokuro looks over at him. The woman does, too. Rokuro isn't the type to yell. He's a solid man, a steady man, whose voice never rises above a dull roar except for an emergency. Even when he's escorting rowdy patrons out of the teahouse, he is usually silent. In the year he's spent in Fukiage, Shikamaru has never heard the man yell. 

Rokuro says something to the merchant carting in boxes of fruit to the teahouse kitchen before he gestures to the woman and they both walk towards Shikamaru. They stop a respectful distance away, the woman perhaps a step behind Rokuro out of deference to him or out of distaste of Shikamaru. He wonders how many of Hanako's flowers she's met so far. 

The others are busy upstairs, slowly rising with the noise that occurs on the lower levels. They're bathing, washing their hair, perfuming themselves. They'll start on their hair and actually dressing sometime later, closer to sundown. For now, there is breakfast to be eaten at noon, muscles to be stretched and bruises covered for the coming night. 

"This is Sakura-san," Rokuro says, introducing the woman. "She's the newest addition to the guard."

The edges of Shikamaru's mouth quirk up in a little smirk. Sakura. How fitting considering her hair. The look in her eyes is neutral, considering. It's a face Shikamaru has seen on Ino. Like she knows what he's thinking about her hair and her name, and she's heard it so many times before that it would bore her to hear him repeat them. 

So he doesn't. 

"Hello, Sakura-san," Shikamaru says. "I'm Shikamaru, though my clients call me Shiromaru. I'll be in your care."

He nods politely to her, and she nods back. There is a little furrow between her pretty pink eyebrows. 

"If I may ask, Shikamaru-san, why do you go by a false name?"

He smiles. Rokuro huffs out a sigh. 

"I don't much like the idea of a john shouting the name my mother gave me in the middle of a service," Shikamaru replies. 

The answer makes Sakura lift her eyebrows, and there's a measure of a flush on her throat, mostly covered by her pale blue haori. 

"Shikamaru," Rokuro chides. "Don't frighten her off with your foolishness. She's only just started with us today."

"My, my," Shikamaru replies, taking a lazy drag off his cigarette. "I'll be nice. She'll have to build a resistance to such talk if she's going to cover the back rooms."

He looks to Sakura, whose flush now looks less like embarrassment at talk of sex and now more a tightly tamped down irritation. It's another expression he's seen on Ino's face. 

"I'm sure I'll be able to handle it, Shikamaru-san," Sakura says, voice steady. 

He lifts an eyebrow. She doesn't stand like a kunoichi, doesn't hold herself like she's carrying her own deadliness in the palm of her hand. There are knives up her sleeves, he can tell. He doubts anyone else would be able to tell, but there's a certain weight to her haori's sleeves that Shikamaru recognizes. It isn't a weight that holds her down. Clearly she's been disguising kunai in her sleeves for years. 

She's either a samurai way too far away from home, a rōnin, or a clever kunoichi undercover. 

Now would be a poor time to expose himself. Rokuro was around for one, and several merchants, and sleepy sex workers were milling about. Besides, there was a chance she wasn't his back-up, but from a foreign village. It's a question he'll have to ask Asuma. He isn't expecting anyone to give him a hand, though he doubts that he would have been notified. 

Asuma came on an irregular schedule, the same ways Shikamaru's updates did. It was entirely possible that Sakura had arrived before an announcement of her aid reached Shikamaru. He doubted that the Uchiha could afford to keep funneling money outside of the village and through Kumo and back again for not only one operative but two. 

"Shika!" Isamu's voice bellows from within the house. 

Shikamaru narrows his eyes, wincing at the noise. 

"Where are my pearl combs, you thieving sack of shit?!"

"What a drag," Shikamaru heaves. 

He's got a little less than half a cigarette left. He holds it out for Rokuro to take, and he does with a chuckle. 

"Rokuro-san," he says, nodding at him, "Sakura-san. I'll be seeing you."

He waves his fingers in goodbye, already trying to figure out how exactly he can suss out if Sakura is here to help him or to help herself. 

* * *

 

"My combs, Shikamaru," Isamu says, in his room her hands on her hips, looking fiercely annoyed. 

Shikamaru rolls his eyes and opens up his nightstand where the black backed pearl decorated combs are nestled. He hods them out to her and she snatches them from his hands. Huffy, she disappears back to the women's side of the hall, leaving Shikamaru to get ready by himself. He drops the cigarette behind his ear onto his nightstand and sets himself to his task. 

He hadn't been very busy the previous night, so he had managed to get up and bathe before everyone else had finished working. He isn't expecting anyone to ask for him tonight, so he takes his time, eating the apple he had nabbed on his way back through the teahouse and up the stairs. 

He sits down at the mirror on his wall, looking over his appearance. His blinds are half drawn, leaving just enough shadow on the walls so that he can pretend he feels comfortable here. He has no weapons other than them, and no defenses either. 

He runs a hand over his bandaged ribs and wonders if the injury will draw a new pair of eyes to him, or will keep patrons away. There were soft types that liked feeding the workers in Fukiage. Chinatsu had one regular who only wanted to feed her fruit by hand, and would pay to do it for evenings on end. 

He takes several slow, deep breaths. He eats his apple. Then, he begins to dress. 

He starts with his hair, brushing and then combing it until it goes soft and a little fluffy, sleep knots worked out of it through his diligent work. He dabs myrrh behind his ears and along his clavicle, eyes narrowing at the fading bruises there. 

Blue would be best to wear to go with them, so that the faint red of the healing marks seems all the brighter. He finishes his apple, eats everything except for the seeds and the stem before he stands and begins to dress. 

The blue yukata is as plain as all his other ones, and intentionally so. He needs to give off an air of superiority, of boredom, even here when he can only make his way by actively seeking and being sought out. The yukata is softly decorated with pale purple diamonds in a diamond formation on either breast. 

He tugs at his earlobes and puts on a pair of onyx cube earrings. He licks his pinkies and runs them over his eyebrows, and with his comb, he sweeps half of his hair up into a bun, so that the rest can fall around the back of his neck. He reaches into his nightstand and rummages around until he finds a pair of tama kanzashi; black bodied with pale purple beads. 

Those had been a parting gift. People this far from hidden villages had no need to understand genjutsu. If he ever needed to use them, no one would recognize what he was doing. He only wears them tonight because of Sakura, and because they match. 

Wryly, he thinks of how proud Ino would be of him. 

Once he dresses, he takes a nap. It will take the others hours to look as prepared as they must be to serve their types. Shikamaru got by on his own brand of laziness, cultivated until it was something razor sharp and fine. 

When he sleeps in his clothes, he wakes looking already loved and rumpled. His yukata will fall just so over his shoulder to expose his throat. His hair will look untidy in a charming way. His voice will have a rasp halfway between sleep and smoke. His bare feet, the curve of his ankle, will look endlessly sweet. 

And when he wakes up, there is dusk light through the window and the shadows that cloak him have grown thicker. 

He wraps them around himself in his sleep so that he can feel it when others try to enter his room. Now as he rises, they fall down over him like water. He stretches, yawns, and joins the throng of men, women, those outside, in-between, or both, as they move down the stairs.

Nobu does a head count at the base of the stairs as all thirty of them head out into the main rooms. Shikamaru, taller than most, keeps an eye out for a shock of pink hair. He doesn't see it by the back rooms, which means she's either guarding out front or in the back for her first night. It makes sense, considering how red she had gotten when Shikamaru had only referenced what the work the flowers of Fukiage did for a living. 

Sage only knew how the rōnin girl would respond to  _hearing_ that work getting done. 

"Shikamaru," calls a breathy voice from his right. 

Uyeda, pale blue haired and grey eyed attaches himself to Shikamaru, holding onto the taller man's arm as they head towards the polite entertaining rooms in the front of the teahouse. 

"Sit with me," he whines. "Your nice oji-sans might talk to me, too if you do."

Shikamaru scoffs, letting the younger man steer him towards the shogi set that Shikamaru usually settles himself down at. There is an array of pillows on the floor of the polite entertaining rooms for added comfort. In the corner, red lanterns have been lit along with fairy lights that loop themselves along the walls, casting soft, winking light.

"Fine," Shikamaru says, settling down. 

He lounges, cat like and easy and Uyeda bounces down to throw himself daintily over and a little bit between Shikamaru's outstretched legs. 

"Don't get mad at me if none of them like you," he mumbles, wincing at the pain in his ribs as Uyeda wriggles to get comfortable. "They're very specific with what they like."

"If you can make them like you," Uyeda mumbles haughtily, "I'm sure I can, too."

Shikamaru rolls his eyes, but the brat eyes his ribs and is more careful, keeping his weight on Shikamaru's legs rather than his ribs. He drops a hand on top of Uyeda's head, and wonders if it's Botan or Koichi that always wants to see him with someone else.

"My, my," he replies, hand dropping to lightly cup Uyeda's cheek. "Aren't you cocky?"

He holds the position as the front doors open, and regulars who know better than to arrive later into the night begin to funnel in. Uyeda smirks, easily catching onto Shikamaru's game. He's dressed more ornately, in a pale blue kimono that matches his hair, which is pulled back and decorated with the pearl combs Shikamaru recognizes as Isamu's. He grins a little, brushing a lock of hair at Uyeda's temple.

"She's not going to like that," he says, lifting an eyebrow. 

Uyeda licks at his lower lip, eyelids rimmed in black. He stretches out his legs to expose them to the warm summer air. They are one of a handful of Fukiage workers in the room, and their proximity is immediately eye catching. 

Sasuke, another of the quiet mean type, sweeps in clad in dark blue and sharp red. He sits down in a huff, ignoring Shikamaru, Uyeda, and the others. He positions himself under the hazy light of a red lantern, firmly placing the spotlight on him even though the room has organized itself around Shikamaru, Uyeda, and the shogi board. 

"She'll deal," Uyeda replies. 

Then, there is the sound of footsteps and opening doors. Hungry breath and lids low over the eyes, curiosity and arousal tumbling into all of the polite rooms in the teahouse. Shikamaru feels their shadows, counts the early evening turn out and prepares for an evening of Uyeda on his lap, bothering his customers with his whining. 

"Shiro-kun," calls a familiar voice from the doorway. 

Shikamaru turns his head and Uyeda leans in closer, his lips barely brushing the skin on Shikamaru's cheek. 

Botan, a Suna veteran of the Third War enters the room ahead of some others, knowing where to find Shikamaru. His eyes track over Shikamaru's messy hair, his dark blue yukata, and the young man in his lap, vying for a kiss. 

"Botan," Shikamaru purrs, dropping a hand on Uyeda's shoulders. "I have the board all set up. Would you like to play?"

He sits down before Shikamaru, Uyeda placing his head on Shikamaru's shoulder in a coy, inviting way. From the way Botan looks at the both of them, Shikamaru's easy sexuality and Uyeda's eagerness, his annoyance at being ignored, it's clear to Shikamaru that Uyeda will get exactly what he wanted from this little interaction; more attention. 

"I would," Botan says, gesturing to the servant girl at the door for his usual drink, a honey wine, imported on his own dime for his brief visits to Fukiage. "Tell me, Shiro-kun, who is your lovely little friend?"

Uyeda giggles, and buries his satisfied smile in Shikamaru's shoulder. Shikamaru reaches his hand up the back of Uyeda's neck and gives his hair a little tug. Uyeda gasps, and the sound makes Botan's pupils dilate. Easy. 

"This is Uyeda," Shikamaru says, introducing them. "And he's _terrible_."

Uyeda smiles. The servant girl returns and gives Botan his drink. The flowers of Fukiage aren't allowed to drink, at least not any of the ones who have been there for under three years. 

"I am," Uyeda coos.

Over his head as Uyeda plays out his pretty introduction, Shikamaru watches Sasuke, stiff backed and dead eyed, staring straight ahead. It's his regular brand of agitated. When his patron arrives, he never comes downstairs. He goes straight to the back and ignores the other workers. He doesn't have a show tonight either; his shakuhachi performances always occurred in the gardens outside, where the sound of the delicate flute could tease the wind. 

Shikamaru narrows his eyes, looks up at the lantern, and focuses on the feeling of Sasuke's shadow. Uptight as its owner, still under his little red spotlight. 

"Right, Shiro-kun?"

He turns, but slowly, only half surprised he has been talked to without listening. 

Uyeda is taking up a good portion of his space, purposely, his mouth brushing against Shikamaru's. Shikamaru lifts an eyebrow, and quickly nips Uyeda's lower lip. It makes him smile and press in for a real kiss, but Shikamaru turns his face. In the same motion, he tugs a second time at Uyeda's blue hair and gestures at the shogi board between himself and Botan. 

"Would you like the first move?"

Botan smiles and takes a drink. From the other rooms, Shikamaru can hear the steady beginnings of conversation and from outside, he can hear revelry from theaters and brothels alike. He can hear Chinatsu's high bell-like laugh, and the soft shuffling feet of the servant girls, carefully de-sexed so that they are not propositioned. He can hear Sasuke's shadow, its black chest rising and falling as Sasuke's does.

When the sun sets, the district wakes up, and Fukiage is an early riser. 


	3. Chapter 3

Fukiage is extraordinary.

As soon as the natural light outside coalesces into heady dusk, the teahouse comes alive. Lanterns are lit, incense curls up into the ceiling, and low laughter begins to tumble from the lips of those who work there and from those who seek their pleasure.

Sakura isn't able to see very much of it. She's in the back for the first part of her shift because it's the easiest shift. People rarely come through the back of the teahouse, and would be rapists were the only ones likely to approach from behind. But even that, Yoshiaki had insisted, happened with such infrequency that the occurrences were rarely of note.

The other guards, Nobu, Yoshiaki, and Rokuro, all kept their swords at their hips and Sakura kept herself dressed in kind. Her bow and arrows were upstairs still, tucked away with the rest of her meager possessions.

She had five kunai in each sleeve, and like her mother had, there were flat blades tucked into gauntlets at her wrists. Even more like Hōjō Sumire, Sakura's hair was pulled back into a braided bun threaded through with tidy senbon. 

She was armed reasonably, but the lack of action made her weapons feel all the more heavy. Sakura knew better than to grimace through her discomfort; sweat could pool on her eyeballs themselves and still she would not falter. 

Besides, being armed in such a way reminded her of her mother. 

The thought of her provided Sakura endless sorrow. Her time of mourning had been cut much too short by her own doing, and then by her expulsion from the family. Did she even have any right to grieve still, for Sumire's loss?

Every day since the one that made her a rōnin, Sakura has wondered if it was worth it. If she should have waited for justice on someone else's terms. On the family's terms. But one look into her grandfather's face had told Sakura that he would do nothing. She had watched her father grit his teeth, and hide his rage behind a calm cultivated over decades. 

He may have been able to accept it, but Sakura was not. And when she did what she had done, he had known. He was proud of her, for doing the thing that he had not. She always did have her mother's temper, and he loved them both for it. He would not have armed her as she fled if he did not think she had done the right thing. 

He would not have given her, her mother's kodachi if he had not been proud of her. 

Sakura had preferred the kodachi herself, and had earned hers on her own merit. Her mother's - her mother's sword had been an invaluable gift. They had been of a height when Sumire had been killed, and Sakura had grown up practicing holding her mother's heavy blade for as long as she could remember. She could recall a time when she needed to use two hands to hold it up. 

Now it rests on her hip, its deep purple scabbard a stark difference to the heavy red of her own. Sakura had been grateful to be able to take her own when her father brought it to her. When he presented her with her mother's as well, she had nearly wept.

Now, here she is. No longer Hōjō Sakura, scion and onna-bugeisha of a samurai clan as old as the land itself. Now she was only Sakura. Fallen low from her former status and doing laundry and cutting wood to feed herself. Protecting whorehouses like common muscle. 

It makes her want to scream. Not because she has been abandoned by her clan,  but because she is fully aware that she did the right thing, and that she was banished anyway. No one was going to get justice for Sumire. No one was going to avenge her. And Sakura did. 

Perhaps she should have killed herself instead of insisting on living. Would that have been the right thing to do, as well? She hadn't thought so at the time. It had been in the plan, yes, but taking her own life get too much like letting those men win. 

No, she'd rather be a thorn on their side. One of the best warriors in the clan, a skilled archer, a talented swordsman, clever and decisive in battle, brutally strong on her own merit. And gone because they would not avenge her mother. 

Perhaps her education would be seen as a waste now, to some of them. And they would have to figure out a way to bring in more money to the clan without her extra muscle, or the possibility of her being married off. Perhaps they were shitting in their boots now, worried that she would bring the same fury she had brought on her mother's killers onto her kinsmen as well.

She hoped they were shitting themselves. 

She would never go back for them. No, they weren't worth it. But if they came for her, she would show them what she had thought of their inaction. She would make them regret leaving her mother to die. She would make them regret leaving Sakura to do all the dirty work. She would make them regret making her a rōnin. She would make them regret not killing her when they had the chance. 

That night, they had come fast for her. But Sakura had been faster.

She still doesn't know if they had come to put her on trial or to kill her. Perhaps it was better now that she hadn't found out. 

Nobu, blond haired and clad in black and blue sidles up to her. He's got a piece of straw in his mouth, and looks deceptively like a country bumpkin. Sakura had seen him do the head count at the base of the stairs when the night was just beginning, and the clear way he knows every single flower in Fukiage tells Sakura all she has to know about how seriously he takes his work. 

She can appreciate someone who takes themselves seriously. Even bodyguards for brothels. 

"Sakura-kun," Nobu says, sidling up beside her. "I'm here to relieve you. You'll be up front until Yoshiaki comes to switch with you for an internal round."

Sakura nods brusquely, accepting the order for what it is. When she gets a better grasp on exactly how long each shift lasts, she'll be able to move seamlessly with the guard as it rotates outside and within the teahouse. For now, she'll need to be told. 

"It's a nice night," Nobu continues. "House is full of regulars. You shouldn't get much trouble out front."

Which is why they're sending her out to guard the front. It's a good tactic, to send her to one of the more dangerous points to protect when the night is easy. She'll get a feel for the way the johns behave outside, and exactly what she'll have to do if they try to muscle in past her. 

"Thank you, Nobuyuki-san," she replies. 

"I insist, Sakura-kun," he says, waving a hand at her and smiling, "Nobu is just fine."

She nods a second time, then leaves for the front of the teahouse. 

She does not walk through Fukiage to get to the front. Rather, she takes the slightly longer route, moving around the teahouse until she reaches its front doors. True to Nobu's word, nobody is around to muscle their way in. Yoshiaki is standing in the front doorway, watching while the changing of the guards takes place. When he sees her, he gives her a little salute before he retreats back inside. 

The work out front is slightly more complicated than the work in the back, but only slightly. All she has to do is make sure no one enters Fukiage with a weapon, or tries to force their way in. If someone is visibly inebriated, she cannot let them in either. She is not to accept bribes from people who want to keep their weapons or enter drunk.

Essentially, if they look like a threat to the teahouse or those within it, Sakura is within her rights to turn them out on their asses. A simple job. One that paid in room and board. Sakura thinks back to the lunch she had taken before the teahouse had opened for the evening. She thinks to the lush peach she had been able to bite into afterwards, a treat she had not expected Hanako to offer her. 

Brothel or not, Fukiage was leagues away from the squalor that Sakura had endured on her way to get there. She only had a week to prove her worth to these people, and she was hoping that she would be able to. She didn't like the idea of wandering any longer. And maybe given enough time, she could earn enough money to travel to Konohagakure, where she could hire herself out for mercenary work. 

It left a sour taste in her mouth to do so, but Sakura was nameless now. She had to do what she had to do to survive without a clan to protect her. Besides, it could have been much worse. Sumire had the benefit of the Hōjō's protection, and look what had happened to her. 

At least now that she is on her own, Sakura is twice as capable of looking out for herself. And if that means looking over both shoulders, then so be it. 

* * *

 

The night goes on with little fanfare. Sakura lets several men and women into Fukiage, and doesn't have to turn very many away. When they approach, she looks for swords and subjects them to a polite but brisk pat down. When they come up clean, she lets them in. 

Hanako has built a reputation for her pristine care of her flowers. Only once did someone manage to get into her teahouse with a weapon. They had butchered one of the boys. After that, no one except for the guards of Fukiage were allowed blades of any kind. Regular customers had little difficulty accommodating the new rule; some of them had been patrons of the boy that had been killed, and were comfortable making a small allowance. 

The sun dips fully into evening as Sakura stands guard out front. She watches people pass by, eyes flittering from interested face to interested face. Some go on, preferring a different teahouse across the road, or brothels that more seriously declare their occupation with pink mouthed girls and messy haired boys lingering out front instead of inside. 

A troupe of people catches Sakura's attention. Two individuals, a man and a woman, probably around Sakura's own age. The woman has hair the color of rich blood, and eyes of a similar shade tucked behind a pair of black rimmed glasses. The man's hair is blond, and his eyes are a startling shade of blue. Their skin is tanned, and they are dressed in foreign clothing, that is all swaths of expensively colored fabric. 

They both wear hitai-ate, the woman around her throat and the man on his forehead, decorated with a single spiral. 

Sakura has only been here a day, and she knows already that it is rare for shinobi to wear their hitai-ate when entering flower districts from lands they are not native to. It arouses suspicion, and it is something that people remember. Shinobi are too clever to do anything that will make them memorable. 

Sakura lets her attention stay with them, hands folded across her chest and chin held up high. She won't reach for either of her swords yet, not until they approach. Hanako has no rules against shinobi in her teahouse, but disarming a shinobi was akin to declawing a cat; they didn't fucking like it. 

"I can't believe you made me come here, I wanted to go buy perfumes and you get us stuck in the  _red light district._ "

"I'm sorry," the man replies, scratching the back of his head. "I think that old man thought we were looking for something different when you asked about the floral scents."

With nearly a roar, the red haired woman slaps the man on the back of the head. 

"You think so?!" she shrieks. 

Sakura relaxes minutely. They're shinobi, Uzushiogakure shinobi from the look of their hitai-ate, but they're lost, not looking for a good time. She thinks to leave her post just to walk further towards the front gate of Fukiage to give them directions out of the teahouse, when a voice and a hand dropped on her shoulder stop her. 

The grip is deceptively light; someone who knows how to use their hands for battle, someone who knows their own strength, but has not been able to use it for some time and so is hesitant. She looks over her shoulder, wondering if perhaps it is Rokuro or Yoshiaki needing something from her. 

Instead, it is one of the most gorgeous men she's ever seen in her life. 

He is pale skinned and dark haired, forelocks falling sweetly over his face in a curtain that smells faintly of the incense that burns inside of Fukiage. His eyes are dark, almost pitch black, and he is dressed resplendently in a dark blue kimono, decorated finely with a sprawling red and white dragon. 

He is dressed the part as a flower of Fukiage, but there is something in his eyes that tells Sakura he belong there about as much as she does.

"Tell them to go back the way they came until they see a dango stand," he says, voice low and impassive. "If they make a right there and keep walking, they'll get to the craftsmen."

Sakura nods slowly, surprised by the advice. The black haired man leans back, his kimono clearly exposing his throat. His hand leaves her shoulder almost as quickly as it arrived.

She walks forward to the gate of the teahouse, only once to see if the man behind her is still standing in the doorway. He is.

"Shinobi-san!" Sakura calls when she makes it to the gate. "Shinobi-san! Uzushio shinobi-san!"

The woman hears her before the man does, and her bright red eyes narrow with distrust. She sizes Sakura up, gaze flickering suspiciously from Sakura to the man behind her. But the blond man looks at Sakura as if he has not even considered that she might be trying to flag him down so that he'll enter the teahouse under her protection.

"You're lost, yes?" Sakura asks.

The two shinobi look at one another, and then approach as one, the woman only a half step behind the man. Her eyes flutter away from Sakura, as if she is not worth looking at, and they land squarely on the dark haired man behind her.

"Is it obvious?" the man asks, laughing a little at his own folly.

Sakura smiles at him, and it isn't difficult to. There is something bright and burning about this man. He speaks kindly not because he is putting on airs, but because he is kind. It does not occur to him to be in any way malicious.

It's oddly infectious.

"Only a little," Sakura replies. "To get out of the district, turn around the way you came. Walk until you see a dango stand, then make a right and keep walking. Then you should find the perfumes and chemists you are looking for."

The red eyed woman breaks her staring contest with the black haired man to look at Sakura at the mention of perfumes. The blond haired man turns over his shoulder, mumbling the directions under his breath as he commits them to memory.

"Thank you very much," the man says, now beaming. "I think we can figure it out thanks to your advice."

"I'm happy to help, shinobi-san."

"Naruto," the man replies.

"Naruto," Sakura says, not laughing because she was raised better than to. "I'm Sakura."

"It suits you," Naruto replies, a little smile on his face.

"More than you know."

Naruto's smile becomes a little curious, and like the red haired woman attending him, he looks behind Sakura to the teahouse. His eyebrows furrow together, as if he is seeing something for the first time.

"What is this place, Sakura-san?" he asks.

The red haired woman huffs, sounding annoyed.

"Like you don't know," she snipes.

"This place is Fukiage," Sakura says, interrupting primly. "A teahouse."

Naruto, slightly taller, looks down at Sakura in a way that manages to be neither patronizing or condescending. Rather, the look on his face is a little wry.

"Is it only a teahouse?" he asks.

"To some, yes."

"And what is your name?" Naruto calls over Sakura's shoulder, to the dark haired man still standing in the doorway.

Sakura doesn't look over her shoulder to see the stunning man reply. Instead, she looks at the red haired woman, who seems to be in some kind of distress. There is something about the situation that Naruto's companion clearly does not like, and Sakura isn't sure if it's the fact that she's in the flower district or that Naruto suddenly doesn't seem too keen on leaving.

"I'm not named after food or flowers if that's what you're asking," the dark haired man replies.

Sakura doesn't roll her eyes. The women of her clan had been named for the color of their hair for generations. Sakura had cousins called Shion and Tsubaki and Tsutsuji, Saboten, and Kuroyuri. Her mother Sumire had lovely pale purple hair, that wound down her back beautifully whenever she had to brush it. 

Naruto finds the remark funny as he looks at the man behind Sakura. Both Sakura and Naruto's companion seem unamused. 

"It isn't what I'm asking," Naruto says, "but it's a good start. What's your name?"

It occurs to Sakura then, what the man is doing. He's baiting Naruto. Like he's chosen the person he wants to spend money on him tonight, and now he's manipulating him into Fukiage, and into the beds in the back rooms that Sakura is supposed to guard later. 

He's good at it. But despite Naruto's kindness, there's something undeniably intelligent lurking in his bright blue eyes. He knows the dark haired man is trying to play him. But he seems curious about the outcome, if he allows this to proceed as the man wants it to. 

"Take a walk with me," the man drawls, "and maybe I'll tell you."

Sakura tenses minutely at that, and it doesn't go unnoticed. The red haired woman sneers at her, but Sakura knows better than to falter, to show her irritation at being underestimated in such a way. 

A walk meant going out back, and going out in the back gardens meant Nobu's attention would be divided between watching the dark haired man and Naruto and making sure potential rapists didn't get into the teahouse. While Nobu had been in Fukiage for longer than Sakura had, the divisions of attention made Sakura a little unsteady. 

She didn't like the idea, but there were only four guards at Fukiage. This black haired man had to make his money somehow. If Rokuro and Yoshiaki could guard all the flowers within the teahouse, then Nobuyuki was probably more than capable of covering two heads behind the teahouse. 

"You'll have to disarm if you would like entry, shinobi-san," Sakura says, easily becoming the calm professional once more. 

The red haired woman turns on Naruto then, displeasure written across her face. 

"Absolutely not," she hisses. 

"Karin, c'mon," Naruto says. "It's just a walk. I'll be there and back in no time."

"You want to enter a  _brothel_ on a  _diplomatic mission_? And you want to go in  _unarmed?"_

"What's the worst that could happen?"

"First off, an assassination attempt."

"No one is going to assassinate me."

"I will, if you do this stupid,  _ridiculous, idiotic -_ ,"

"Here," Naruto says, digging into his pocket. He pulls out a hideously childish frog shaped wallet, and tugs out several bills that he offers Karin. "Take this, follow the directions and go get the most expensive, niche perfume money can buy."

Karin narrows her eyes at the cash, not looking convinced. 

"We came all this way for titanka perfume. If you give me an hour, you won't even have to pay for the bottle yourself."

Karin grits her teeth, but takes the money. She counts the bills neatly before stuffing them in her own pocket. 

"You," she says, pointing one finely manicured finger into Naruto's face, "will be finished in one hour and if you're not, I  _will_ tell Nagato and we will  _both_ tell your mom."

Naruto visibly shudders at the mention of his mother, but he recovers rather quickly. 

"I hear you, cousin," he says, removing the kunai holster on his thigh and the shuriken pouch on his hip. "Loud and clear."

He pulls several other weapons off of him; a fūma shuriken from his other hip, several slim knives out of his sleeves, two slim scrolls, and a stiletto knife from each sandal. He drops the weapons into his cousin's hands, and Sakura steps forward to pat him down. His clothes are heavy looking, but they're deceptively light under Sakura's quick moving hands. They offer several spaces to hide weapons, but Sakura can't feel any pockets. 

She wonders if the weapons he's pulled off his person came from nowhere, supplied by the fuinjutsu of Uzushio. She feels better, seeing the two slim scrolls tidily placed in Karin's hands. The other woman whisks Naruto's weapons away into her own billowy pocketless sleeves. She turns around to leave, then thinks better of it, slaps the back of Naruto's head a second time, before finally heading towards the perfume shop. 

Sakura takes a side step back, allowing Naruto passage to the front steps of the teahouse. 

"I hope you're smarter than you look," the dark haired man says as he turns, guiding Naruto towards the fantastic gardens behind Fukiage. 

"I might not be," Naruto quips, "disarming myself as I have."

Their conversation continues on inside, and Sakura ignores the light sting that comes with being so quickly and easily ignored. She'll get over it. She focuses on the task at hand.

* * *

The rest of the night goes on with little fanfare until abruptly, it does not any more. 

By the time the third rotation comes around, and Sakura is inside, she understands how many hours pass between movements inside and outside of the teahouse. She understands that because she began in the back, that is also how she will end the night. 

There is little for her to worry about inside of the teahouse. The people inside have already been disarmed, and are aware that there is only a certain amount that they are allowed to drink until they are cut off. Hanako ran a tight ship, which was probably why Fukiage had few customers. But those that came paid through the nose to come back again, and Hanako's dealings ensured that her flowers were never harmed to a degree that they could not recover from. 

And Sakura will admit, she can see the appeal. There is the orange haired Chinatsu, whose pretty laugh and lovely calves draw men to her like flies to rich honey. Doe eyed Fumihiro has a speckling of purple bruises at his throat, his head in the lap of a wealthy looking woman who feeds him fruit from her fingertips. 

Pale haired and bright eyed Isamu's kimono is tied so loosely around her waist that there is always the threat of one of her breasts being exposed. There is no doubt that she knows she is on the verge of being uncovered, still she turns her shoulders and leans in close to the men and women around her.

It's a strange little dance, one that Sakura is surprised she is captivated by. She finds that she wants to see the breast lolling sweetly among the folds of Isamu's garment, wants to catch sight of the pretty nipple that already is pressing a hard outline through the fabric.

It surprises Sakura, how easily distracted she has become by the teahouse. Sex isn't something that she's ever shied away from. She is a virgin herself, mostly because she is unmarried, and she had tried to shake the status of virginity like a particularly stubborn tick. Now that she was nameless, she supposed she could do whatever she pleased with whomever she pleased. 

She thinks absently, that it might be a better idea to choose from those in a different teahouse, if that was what she wanted. It seemed too much like pissing where you ate, to hire those who worked in the teahouse. 

But in the front rooms, where she gets to watch delicately done foreplay, all slow blinks and slightly open mouthed, almost exposed breasts and half hard erections daintily lifting fabric, Sakura wonders exactly what she's missing out on. 

It gets a little worse when she's assigned to the back rooms. Not all of the flowers of Fukiage are silent lovers. In fact, several are rather vocal. 

The back rooms of the teahouse are separated from the front ones by a hallway long enough to muffle the noise. But Sakura stands at the end of that hall, watching flowers and patrons come in and come out. And the sounds of their fucking is -  _nice._

No, not nice. Nice isn't the right word for it. It's heady. Deep. The high moans and little sighs of pleasure. A woman's voice, wobbling as she is fucked into. A man's last shout before he spills into someone's mouth or palm. 

Her arousal between her own thighs is warm and surprising. She's felt it before, but usually after or in the heat of a spar with a pretty distant cousin, or with a boy from an allied clan. She wonders if like then, she will touch herself tonight, or if she will be too embarrassed to do so in a brothel, aroused by the sounds of its workers doing their jobs. 

It is Shikamaru that surprises her the most. 

She had watched him in the front rooms, doing a head count every so often, eyes scanning the room to make sure that everyone was occurring smoothly. He had a slightly smaller man in his lap, but he seemed to pay more attention to his customer than to the man occupying his physical space. 

He seemed disinterested. Above it all. More enthralled by the game of shogi than by the conversation occurring right in front of his face. He had felt her gaze once, had looked up and caught her eye. He seemed even disinterested in her, too, until he smirked and returned to his game. 

Perhaps he enjoyed being watched. Perhaps that was why, when Sakura was on rotation in the back rooms, he had walked smoothly into the hallway, his patron and the slightly younger flower in his stead. He had let them walk down the hallway in front of him, had turned his head over his shoulder to sustain Sakura's gaze. 

Perhaps that was why he had chosen the room closest to Sakura's post. Why he had shrugged his shoulders out of his dark blue yukata, revealing slightly tanned skin with shoulders much too broad, too strong to be someone that had been a flower their entire life. 

Maybe he had wanted her to see. Had wanted her to hear. 

She had been told to keep on the lookout, to keep her eyes open for shrieks of pain instead of pleasure, for cries that demanded the ending of a service. The guards and flowers of Fukiage all knew that shouting the word 'kotan' would signal the flower's need for a guard to forcibly end the service. 

And when Sakura hears it coming from the room Shikamaru has entered, she moves. 

She learns that day, that she must listen more carefully. Because a client's name could be 'Botan', and his name is much different than the safe word Fukiage employs. 

She ends up getting an eyeful. The blue haired man's arms held back in a grappling hold, his arms made useless by Shikamaru's own wrapping easily up and back around his neck. The blue haired man with his face flushed, completely naked, his cock invisible inside the mouth of the patron that had followed them inside.

The little rocking, the subtle bounce and the keens from the blue haired man they resulted in, those were the rewards of Shikamaru, simultaneously holding the pale haired man back and bucking into him as well. 

And if the utter debauched look on the blue haired man's face hadn't been enough, if the flush on his cheeks, and the flutter of his eyes back into his head hadn't been enough, if the way he struggled against Shikamaru's hold hadn't been enough, Shikamaru's eyes over his shoulders were. 

His gaze was sharp on Sakura. Not even surprised. Like he had expected this. 

"Did you want an audience, Uyeda?" he asks the blue haired man, still whining 'Botan' instead of the safe word Sakura had thought she heard. "Did you want a guard to see you like this? Is that why you slipped?" 

Uyeda's eyes open, and instead of embarrassment there's something deeply self satisfied in his gaze. An exhibitionist. It shouldn't be a revelation to Sakura. There were probably many of them in Fukiage. 

"Tell me," Shikamaru demands, slamming his hips hard against Uyeda's ass. It bucks Uyeda's cock further down the patron's throat, and he moans with the movement, seemingly unconcerned with the fourth party intruding.

"That's how you get in trouble," Shikamaru murmurs, intentionally making his rhythm as irregular as possible. It visibly makes Uyeda unhappy, his satisfaction giving way to sexual frustration. "You'll apologize later."

Uyeda huffs at that, but Shikamaru must be doing something below, because the meanness in Uyeda's face gives way to a sudden desperation. His eyes screw shut and his fingers grasp for purchase on nothing. 

Shikamaru looks at Sakura over Uyeda's shoulder. He jerks his head to the side, letting her know that all is clear in this room. And as she steps back, sliding the door shut, he gives her a wink. 

Her face is unbearably hot. 

Because it wasn't watching Uyeda come undone that had been so gratifying. It was Shikamaru's arms, strong as a samurai's, strong as a shinobi's, holding Uyeda up and back. It had been the strength in his exposed thighs, that spoke of intense physical conditioning. It was how none of this seemed to produce the slightest strain on him.

There was no show of force with the way he held Uyeda, and his hips rocked almost as if it were easy. It meant he had done harder work than this before. That he was only sweating because of his proximity to another warm body.

He hadn't been a sex worker all his life. Perhaps he had been a laborer. But the hold he had on Uyeda told Sakura a different story. No, he was more like her than she had initially imagined. 

And seeing someone like her, seeing a warrior have sex was something that made Sakura's mouth too dry for words. 

* * *

Her first night almost ends without a hitch. The night winds into day, and even the most stubborn patrons begin to leave. It must nearly be around five or six in the morning, when it happens.

A drunk, fooled somehow by the darkness of the night into thinking it was earlier in the evening rather than later, somehow makes it up onto the front door. Nobu is there, physically trying to push the man back, but alcohol makes people oddly adaptable when it came to repelling attacks. 

Sakura can see the sword strapped to the man's back, its hilt poking just a little bit above his shoulder, and she knows that if this man doesn't get off the porch, there will be problems. 

The flowers of Fukiage have almost all retired for the night except for a small handful of those like Shikamaru, who plays whole games of shogi with his regular. Uyeda has gone to bed, having lost Botan's interest after their first encounter; he was there for Shikamaru, and Uyeda was just an extra. 

Naruto -whose cousin must not have come back for him- was still in the teahouse, talking with the dark haired man. As far as Sakura knew, the two of them had never gone into the back rooms. They had spent most of the night in the back gardens walking, then had retired to the front rooms when the chill of the night became too much for either of them to bear. 

So it's with them and a few other stragglers that Sakura sees the drunk push past Nobu, trying to muscle his way into the teahouse. 

Naruto, an obvious shinobi, is on his feet in an instant. The dark haired man's eyes narrow, and even Shikamaru looks up from his game at the disturbance. 

Sakura moves faster than any of them. Something inside of her pulses with the need to protect and to protect quickly, and then she is there. That strange power had always fluttered in her when she was a child. Through meditation she had honed its use to aid her in battle. 

She doesn't need it to take this man down. If he weren't drunk, he might have been an interesting enemy the way a canary is interesting prey to a wildcat. As he is now, he is so far beneath Sakura that only an earthquake would put them on the same level.

He's a head taller than her, but Sakura has a decent reach. She gets one hand on his bicep, another on his head. Ignoring the acrid smell of rice wine on his mouth, she pushes him a little backwards.

He riots back forwards in an attempt to keep a better handle on his balance. When his foot comes forward to steady himself, Sakura sweeps out her own. She pushes down on his head and arm, and knocks his front foot out from underneath him.

The drunkard hits the ground hard. He doesn't manage to catch himself and his head cracks meanly against the polished wooden floors.  

"You little  _bitch,_ " he groans. 

Sakura's heard worse, but something about the way his lip curls when he says it reminds her of the men that hurt her mother. The way they looked at her when she came for them. They called her a bitch, too, hadn't they. 

A bloodlust so sincere rockets through her in a thrill of adrenaline. He was worthless, hardly worth her time, and yet - Yet he had called her what those men had called her then, and now, she wants to do to him what she did to her mother's killers. 

She crouches down and places one slender hand on the man's head. Her touch is startlingly gentle, and the man's eyes watch her warily. It would be easy, so easy to press her thumbs into his eyes and gouge them out. To slam her palm into his nose, breaking the cartilage and shoving it back and up into his brain. His windpipe would be nothing between her fingers.

She wants to kill him, but he isn't worth the effort.

She gives him a smile, carefully lifting him by his hair before her smooth fingers turn to a fist and she slams his head a second time into the wooden floor. 

"I prefer bitch- _sama_ ," she replies. 

Her hand drops from his head and she grabs a fistful of his collar. With two hands, she tugs him by the throat of his garment down the front steps of Fukiage and out past the front gate. 

"Find another teahouse," Sakura calls, looking down on him. "You aren't welcome in this establishment."

The man, clearly concussed from Sakura's two blows tries to get to his feet. He reaches to draw the sword on his back, but Sakura lays one hand on her mother's kodachi and the man stops. Something in her face must scream for blood, because he drops his arm and stumbles away. 

Sakura breathes deep, swallows her bloodlust, and takes her hand off her mother's weapon.

She turns around to head back up the steps into the teahouse, and Nobu is there with his arms folded, laughing a little at her. 

"Well look at you,  _Bitch-sama_ ," he says, letting out a low whistle. "You fit in here just fine."

Sakura snorts as she passes him by. He gives her a light clap on the shoulder as he goes, and maintains his post out front. 

"Wow, Sakura-san," Naruto says when she fully reenters the teahouse. "You did great out there. Barely gave me a chance to show off."

Sakura lifts an eyebrow at him, and wonders about how true his statement is. There's a line of tension in his shoulders that tells her he could've done what she just did, but perhaps twice as recklessly. She wonders how much he would've shown off if given the chance, considering the black haired man sitting primly in the corner. 

"I'm sure you would've gotten your face beaten in," the dark haired man drawls. 

Naruto rises to the bait almost like the dark haired man knew he would. 

"I'm a jounin, Sasuke-teme," Naruto says, eyes narrowed. "Some common drunk couldn't beat me in a fight."

"A nameless samurai got to him before you could," Sasuke huffs. "Doesn't seem like you're going to make Genzaikage if someone like her is faster than you."

Naruto takes great offense to that, and nearly leaps across the room to chew Sasuke's ear off about it. Sakura grinds her teeth, quite used to being denigrated. But being called a bitch and having her nameless status thrown back into her face by someone she barely knows is sticking like a thorn in her side. 

She decides right then that she doesn't like Sasuke. Naruto is right, the black haired boy is a bastard. It aggravates her a little, to see someone with as much obvious shine as Naruto get along with someone with an attitude like Sasuke's. 

Then again, maybe that was the appeal. Maybe Naruto was the last one to leave because this was some kind of foreplay. Sakura huffs, and heads back towards the stairs to get the evening headcount from Rokuro. She doesn't want to see the front of the teahouse any longer, even as the desexed servant girls and boys slowly begin to blow out the lanterns and scoop up plates of unfinished food and cups of unfinished sake. 

As she goes, she can feel a pair of eyes on the back of her neck. She indulges in looking over her shoulder. 

Shikamaru's dark eyes are watching her with undisguised interest. The gaze is different, yet the same as it was when she walked in on him earlier. Curious. Satisfied. Not hungry, but perhaps finding an appetite. 

The back of Sakura's neck reddens, but she forces herself to keep her pace the same as she heads down the hall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'genzai' means current, and the genzaikage is the leader of uzushio. i'll let you guess just who that might be. 
> 
> ratings have changed, so double check them to make sure this fic is still your cuppa!


	4. Chapter 4

She can manipulate chakra.

At a rudimentary level, perhaps, but even that could be a front. Only talented shinobi could fake being bad at something as simple as a flash-step, or a burst of speed to get rom one enemy to another.

He had been on enough missions with Shushin no Shisui to know that; the man was the fastest thing Konoha had ever seen but when he was up against a foreign nin, he could trip over his feet just long enough to make the poor bastard believe that he had no idea what he was doing.

There was of course, the off chance that she really was just a rōnin, that had managed to figure out how to manipulate chakra on her own. But even that wasn't something Shikamaru would put much stock in.

Few samurai families even considered chakra a tool that ought to be used in battle; many saw it as a means to cheat. They preferred to use their own power from their own bodies, not relying on a well of 'magic' as some called it, to win their battles for them.

It was one of the reasons why so few samurai families had joined hidden villages, the Hatake being an example. 

In either case, whether she was an undercover operative sent to help or hinder him, or if she really was as unaffiliated as she proclaimed herself to be, he needed more information. 

* * *

The morning after Sakura's first night at Fukiage, Shikamaru lounges on the back verandah in the welcome shade. It's a warm day out, the sun shining almost excessively. The shadows are long and sharp in the day, and the dangerous shape of them makes Shikamaru feel at home. 

He's got one of Isamu's cigarettes tucked behind his ear, and he lifts it, twirling between his fingers. He's got the shōgi board set up already, and his bare foot hangs over the edge of the verandah in the sunshine. He twiddles his shadow's toes, manipulating his own foot in a roundabout way. 

He had sent Isamu after Sakura some five minutes ago. She had lifted an eyebrow at him, still mussed from her own sleep, and tugging the sleeve of her robe up over her shoulder.

"Sakura-san doesn't look like the type to shit where she eats," Isamu said, sniffing prettily. "Besides, you don't seem her type."

Shikamaru lifted an eyebrow. 

"She walks like a virgin," he quipped. "Anyone with a mouth is probably her type."

Isamu grumbled something about being cocky, but went off to find the new teahouse guard anyway. Shikamaru had gone downstairs, happy to be in the warmth of the day. All of the deliveries for the week had been completed the previous day, and now the resplendent back gardens of Fukiage were all but silent. 

The trees were heavy with flowers, heavy with summer fruit almost too ripe, to sweet to taste. The breeze was perfumed with dying fruit blossoms, heavy and heady in the summertime. It almost reminded him of home. 

The copse of flower and fruit bearing trees were nothing like the dense, dark ones of the Nara forest, where so little light broke through the canopy that there was nothing but shadow on the forest floor. Clear as day, he remembers the moment his father and mother both took him into the forest to teach him how to use their clan techniques.

It had begun with a game of hide and seek. He had been six, and not even remotely terrified when he found a full grown buck instead of his mother. 

Now, the memories of home make him want to suck down a cigarette faster than Asuma does. He's been under for nearly fourteen months now, and he has a lead, he knows he has a lead. Sage's balls, he's found  _Sasuke_. That was what he had been sent out here to do. He's positive that the coded report he sent back to the Uchiha about their youngest son's whereabouts was both welcomed and loathed. 

He had thought it would've been enough to show up, get close enough to the brat to tell him that Shikamaru was here to extract him. But it was clear that Sasuke didn't remember Shikamaru from their childhood, and that whoever took him and brought him to Fukiage had ensured that much. 

It made sense. Being groomed from the age of six would do that to anyone, and Sasuke hadn't been old enough to receive proper training to ward off conditioning of that kind. He had been lost to Konoha, lost to his family for fourteen years. And now, here Shikamaru was to spring him out, and the kid couldn't even bother to be grateful. 

Uchiha Mikoto had been tight lipped about the mission, which made sense. Funneling money out of Konoha, through Kumo, and back again for a solo mission was already dangerous enough. Tantamount to treason. But how else could she have done it? How else could she have legitimized the search for her missing son?

She had sat him down in a dango shop, Itachi sitting nearer to the door. And while Itachi weaved an illusion over them, one that supposed that Shikamaru was only asking Mikoto for advice on how to become stronger against genjutsu, Mikoto had given Shikamaru a proposition. 

And here he is, fourteen months later with her son right in front of his face but without a solid plan for getting him out. The Uchiha were still well reviled within the village, that much was true. Uchiha Sasuke's disappearance hadn't caused nearly as much ruckus as the near kidnapping of Hyūga Hinata. Though, that was largely because it was reported that Sasuke had died. 

A body had been recovered, but Uchiha Mikoto insisted that it was not her son that she buried. She had no leads, other than a lock of hair she received every year, ensuring that her son was still alive. That was what she had told Shikamaru. To him, that was all he needed to know. It meant captivity. It meant that Uchiha Sasuke's 'death' was being used to coerce the Uchiha into line. 

Shikamaru himself didn't think the Sandaime had a stomach for that kind of treachery, that kind of manipulation. There were few people in Konoha that had enough leverage over the Uchiha to even consider doing something as rash as stealing their second son. For a while, Shikamaru had considered those outside of the clan; old enemies from the Warring States Period that held grudges across generations. 

His scope had been broad as all the elemental nations, then narrowed slowly over time. It was only when he was sure that the Uchiha boy was still somewhere in Fire Country that he had set out. The lock of hair that came in the mail was wrapped in a sparse piece of white cloth, indistinct and nearly untraceable.

But the vague smell of persimmon tea was what told him where he had to go. Few places outside of Fire Country could make such a brew, fewer still so effectively that even a small piece of cloth could suck in the aroma with such vigor. It had then become a matter of figuring out which teahouses could effectively brew the tea, and dropping inquiries here and there until he got a bite. 

As the scope of his search got smaller, so did the scope of his suspects. And the one person he suspected most, was a person it would likely take an army to defang. But all of the clues, the hunches, and the gut feelings told him that no one outside of Fire Country knew the heady power of persimmon tea, of chrysanthemums, and black locks of hair. It had led him to a terrible suspicion, and it had led him here. 

Fukiage was the last place he expected to see Uchiha Sasuke. Yet this was where Shikamaru had found him.

* * *

She's pretty. 

With a pleasant face, and eyes as big as tulips; she doesn't need to smile to be pretty. To be sure, Shikamaru prefers the vague suspicion in her gaze, and the way she hides it behind polite indifference. She wants to know why she's been summoned here, away from her sleeping. 

"Good morning, Sakura-san," he says, smiling gamely at her. 

She nods politely at him. He watches her look at the shōgi board in front of him, at his bare foot dangling over the edge of the verandah. She isn't armed, and she's dressed much more casually. She's in a pair of what are obviously Chinatsu's pajama pants, a frothy green pair of satin sleep trousers, and a lighter mesh armor shirt beneath a grey tank top. 

"You aren't dressed," Shikamaru adds, still smiling. 

She purses her lips, but doesn't so much as raise her arms to fold across her chest in defense of herself. 

"Isamu-san said it was urgent, that I didn't need to dress."

Shikamaru shrugs, and gestures at himself. 

"You didn't. I certainly haven't either."

"I see."

She's on slightly unsteady territory, that much he can tell. She isn't entirely uncomfortable, but it's clear there are several places she'd rather be instead of here. 

"Please sit, Sakura-san," he says, gesturing in front of him. "Did you sleep well?"

She tucks her knees under herself and sits, proper as a lady. 

"I did, thank you for asking."

"You had quite the first day," he says, twiddling his cigarette between his fingers. "You made a very good impression, handling that drunk the way you did."

That makes the corner of her mouth quirk up; pride, or something close to it. 

"Do you often have patrons like him?" she asks. "Or is Fukiage less exciting than I thought it would be?"

He chuckles at that, and looks over his shoulder at the gardens. 

"Much, much more boring than you'd anticipate, Sakura-san," he muses. "Unless you know where to look."

He cuts his eyes to her, and he watches a faint blush rise on her cheeks. There's only a little embarrassment in her face. She doesn't duck her chin or try to make herself seem smaller. That's - that's very interesting. 

A virgin, yes, but not frightened or made uncomfortable by sex. Curious about it, ready for it perhaps. 

"Uyeda is a shit," Shikamaru says, lowing his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "He likes to be watched, and he likes to drag everyone into his business. Consider what he did last night a kind of hazing."

Sakura humphs at that, fingers bunching in Chinatsu's green satin pajama pants.

"If he cries wolf too many times, people will stop believing him," she says.

He chuckles at that, and leaves his cigarette behind his ear to smoke later on. The way Sakura carries herself doesn't lead him to believe that she smokes, or that she would take very kindly to him smoking directly in front of her, especially not if he hasn't asked her permission. 

"Though I wonder…"

Her voice peters out into silence, and there's an oddly wry quirk to her mouth. 

"What do you wonder, Sakura-san?" he asks, playing into her game. 

"I wonder if Uyeda-san is not the only person that enjoys being watched."

It isn't a challenge, that much he can tell. There aren't enough teeth in the phrase, and there isn't nearly enough meanness in the way she holds herself for it to be anything other than teasing, good natured as it is. 

Perhaps despite herself, her pupils are dilated, and the flush on her throat has not yet receded; she's attracted to him. 

After spending fourteen months doing things that most active duty shinobi wouldn't touch with a nine and a half foot pole, Shikamaru is well aware of the effect he has on a certain population of people.

He's carefully created an image for himself, for Shiromaru, the aloof, indifferent, often silent, occasionally mean birch tree of Fukiage. Men over forty preferred him, and occasionally young men and women hoping to lose their virginity and by proxy, gain freedom from their families. 

All kinds came through this pocket of Fire Country, known for its teahouses and its bounteous flowers. There had been a Lightning Country princess, brown as the earth with hair white as the sky, that could not rule her people unless she was a woman in the eyes of the law.

Only married women and widows were considered women, so she came to Fukiage, and laid stiff as a board under Shikamaru until he settled her on top. He laid his middle finger on her clit and watched her quiver, shaking her way into becoming queen. She had left a fantastic tip. They were penpals now.

There had been a shinobi of a noble but minuscule clan in Taki, who needed to be 'deflowered' -as he called it- so that he wouldn't be married off against his will. His family had sunk a tidy sum into his education, and the marriage contract would have returned money into their family. But if he were not fit for marriage, he could leave the family and make his own way. 

He had been more proactive, eager to reciprocate. Everything that Shikamaru did to him, he wanted to do back to Shikamaru. 'Just in case', he said the night he had spent in the teahouse. He had spent dusk until the early morning with Shikamaru, learning on his knees or on his back, curious and eager for praise or pointers. He had the thickest teal eyelashes, from beneath a pair of bright orange eyes teared up when he swallowed around Shikamaru's cock.

Sakura doesn't seem like either of them, or the countless others that Shikamaru has seen aside from his regulars. If she is a rōnin as she says she is, then there is no need for her to have sex to protect herself from her clan's politics. If she is a shinobi, the only thing she'd really have to worry about from a sexual encounter would be getting pregnant. 

No. What Sakura looks like to him, is someone who is testing the waters to see where a boundary should be set. 

"I can be an exhibitionist," he says, "if the pay is good."

She smirks, lifting one pink eyebrow. 

"I imagine that you'll do many things if the pay is good."

"Wouldn't you?"

Her hands relax on her borrowed trousers. Was a battle of wits what she was after, if it relaxed her so after it began?

"Money makes the world go around, Shikamaru-san," Sakura replies, still except for the breeze that tousles her hair. "And my world must keep turning."

"As must mine."

"As must yours."

Her hair is long. It had been pulled back out of her face the night before, but it is clear that she wears it loosely in her sleep. It's much longer than he had thought at first; it's nearly at a length with Ino's. Strange; he would've thought someone that abandoned their family would have cut their hair to commemorate their loss. 

"Money that goes out of Fukiage and then back into it, is still money in rotation."

Her flush rises, but that is her only tell. Her mouth doesn't part. There is no spike in her breathing. He does not need to reach for her shadow to feel how cool it is, how pristine it is. Like her, it is still and it betrays nothing. 

"I would have thought I would make the offer to you, Shikamaru-san."

"Does that mean you're interested in procuring my services, Sakura-san?"

"I see the way you move. Your patrons may not see it, but I do."

"And how do I move?"

A half smile spreads over her lips, pink in the morning. There is hunger there, undisguised and not for lack of trying. 

"Like you know how to fight."

It throws him for a small loop. Few shinobi were bold enough to make that kind of claim to someone they suspected was undercover; then again, if Sakura were back-up sent by the Uchiha, perhaps it is better if she spends less time than more beating around the bush. 

"And you know how to fight as well," he says, leaning back onto his hands. "We are all leaves of the same great tree."

He waits, and watches. There is no flicker of recognition in her eye; the phrase is as old as Konoha is, used to identify field operatives to one another. It was more discreet than field sign, and was only used by shinobi in deep cover. Shikamaru only knew it because his mother had told him, and Ino as well. By the time Shikaku tried to tell him, he already had the call and response of the phrase memorized in three of the seven dialects spoken in Fire Country. 

When Sakura doesn't return with, 'The tree that the salamander climbs' he knows that she is not a Konoha shinobi. To be sure, he doubts that she is a shinobi at all. Her rudimentary use of chakra the previous evening had spoken of some moderate training in the shinobi arts, but perhaps that was just the product of meditation and self control. Monks in Fire Country could do such and more without the aid of the academy's curriculum. 

So she is a stranger, but a decent one at that. Despite her clear attraction to many of the workers on duty the previous night, she had watched over her charges protective as a sheepdog.

To be sure, she did not have to behave as she did the previous night, engaging the drunkard as she did. Not drawing her blade and shedding blood in the teahouse had been a wise move, especially to gain the support of the other flowers in the teahouse. And telling the drunkard to call her 'bitch-sama'? That was something right out of Ino's book. 

He liked her. She was clever and she had a mean streak that he had only seen a sliver of. He could appreciate that in a woman. Her arms were visibly strong, well muscled, toned in her mesh armor and the tank top she wore with it. Even her footsteps as she came out of the teahouse to meet him on the verandah were silent. 

By shinobi standards, she was more than attractive. 

As he looks at her, he guesses she would be a solid chuunin, if her skills were transferred to the shinobi world. He hadn't seen her use her kodachi, or the bow and arrow that Isamu said were in her small quarters, but anyone who could put someone on their back in under four seconds head a solid shot at chuunin. 

"Lovely words," Sakura muses. "What poet did you steal them from?"

Shikamaru shrugs a shoulder and says, "A wise old sage named Sho."

"Ah," Sakura says, turning her own eyes to look out at the flowering trees.

She breathes in the summer air, and a yawn comes to her that nearly cracks her jaw. She puts a hand to her mouth to cover it, excusing herself, and it's a damnably cute thing to see. 

"Did you invite me out here to proposition me, to recite poetry, or," she says, turning back to him, and waving her hand over the board, "to play an old man's game?"

Shikamaru cups his hand in his cheek, resting his elbow on his knee. 

"Why not all three?" he asks. 

She huffs a little laugh, and hides that behind her hand as well. 

"I'm afraid I'll have to decline today, Shikamaru-san," she says, shaking her head. "I need to adjust to the resting and waking hours of Fukiage. I came out here expecting to quell a small rebellion with my hands, and now that I know all is right with the world, I'd like to go back to sleep."

She nods her head politely to him, then rolls back onto her feet, easily coming into a standing position.

"If you'll excuse me -,"

"If you're serious," he says, unsure of why he's saying it, too quickly to even feel foolish about it. "If you're serious, ask me again on your off day."

She blinks at him slowly, catching and digesting his meaning. 

Shikamaru does not explicitly enjoy his line of work at Fukiage. He has done a painstakingly good job at ensuring that the people who ask for him are those that want to do things for him and not do him.

He hasn't been as unlucky as Uyeda, or even as Isamu, with partners that make it past the weapon's check but demand acts beyond the comforts of those catering to them. 

Shikamaru has few qualms. He has killed before, and he has nearly been killed. He has tortured, and he has been tortured. There is little that effects him to his core. He grew up alongside the Yamanaka; he has been able to compartmentalize and repress bad memories since the day he turned seven, five years older than the other children of his same year. 

He may not be the most mentally healthy, but if he had a client that demanded asphyxiation, or blood play, he would be able to oblige. He would be able to give and receive in equal measure. He would be worse for wear because of it, yes, but he could do it. 

But Sakura, like his Lightning Country princess and his Takigakure shinobi seems - she seems like the reasonable sort. Like once she got reasonably comfortable, she would be okay leading instead of being lead. 

And she looks strong enough to bench him. Which should not be as attractive as it should be. Part of him is curious to see if those arms could hold him down. And if having sex with Sakura means he has a guard in his pocket, then that was all the better for him, wasn't it? Someone with a weapon, someone with a measure of authority around the teahouse… Yes, that would give Shikamaru a great help. 

"In coarser terms," Sakura begins, looking down at him, "they say you shouldn't shit where you eat."

He gives her a toothy grin.

"I wouldn't mind you eating me, Sakura-san, if that's what you'd like."

"And would you mind if I shat on you?"

"If you paid the right price, I wouldn't mind anything."

And he must say it with too much sincerity, because she tilts her head the smallest bit. He's seen that gesture before. It's small, and considering. It's the way a swordsman will look at their opponent, when they have their blade to their victim's neck. It's the way a predator looks at the mouse between its paws.

It's a pleasant sensation, and he recognizes it immediately. It has been quite some time since he has not been the most dangerous thing in the gardens.

He does not know why Sakura is a rōnin, what unforgivable crime made her leave her people, made her have to give up her name. But there had been killing intent coming off of her when she handled that drunk. Easily tampered and kept at bay, but a breath of it.

It had been potent, thick. The feeling of someone that had killed before debating killing again. Someone who found a measure of joy in watching someone else suffer.

Who had Sakura killed to make her this way? One person or several? Was her kill count near Shikamaru's? Less than? Greater than? Sasuke hadn't been an active duty shinobi ever in his life, regardless of his still unlocked Sharingan and his meager clan training before his 'disappearance' and 'death'.

The other guards of Fukiage were decent men, but not battle tested. All except Rokuro, perhaps, whose age and slight favoring of his left arm spoke of time in the Third War. 

Sakura was too young to have seen the wars that the shinobi world knew, but there was plenty of violence in the provinces of Fire Country. Plenty to be had for anyone that was looking for it. 

Instead of taking a step back and excusing herself, she takes a step forward and crouches down in front of him. She puts her hands on her knees, locks of loose pink hair coming over her shoulder. She smells like the myrrh of the teahouse, of the orange peel soap that Chinatsu uses to wash her hands and face in the mornings when she wakes up. 

She's close, closer than Shikamaru would expect a woman of her recent history to be getting to him. Bold, that's the word for it. She's much bolder than he gave her credit for.

"I'll take you up on that," she says, voice quiet as the breeze whistling through the open windows of the teahouse. "In the meantime…"

She reaches forward, telegraphing the movement for miles so that he does not flinch. That makes him smirk a bit; true to form, only someone trained to fight can clock someone else raised in the same fashion. He shouldn't have been surprised that she knew he had combat experience. 

Her fingers reach out forward, and tuck carefully around his ear. She runs her thumb along its shell, before moving back slowly, until her fingers are just barely slipping through his loose hair. 

When she brings his cigarette to her lips, his eyes narrow but the smile on his face is genuine. 

"Thank you for the conversation."

He reaches inside of his yukata for the lighter he usually keeps in its folds. 

"You don't seem the smoking type," he says, flicking the head off the lighter and sparking a flame. 

Sakura leans close enough for the small flame to make the elegant line of her nose glow a soft orange. She breathes in, eyes fluttering shut as she exhales smoke. 

"You don't know what my type is, Shikamaru-san."

She opens her eyes slowly at him, smiling around the cigarette in her mouth. She's close enough to kiss, and he's tempted, if only out of the awful curiosity that's followed him all his life, dogged his steps despite his proclaimed and put upon shows of laziness.

Shikamaru has always loved puzzles, has always loved games, at least the ones complicated enough to keep his attention. After slamming his head against the dead ends of Uchiha Sasuke and his elusive patron, it was nice to have a simpler mystery. One just as intriguing, but less stressful. He wasn't getting paid to humor Sakura, so he could drag it out, could enjoy it. 

"Be careful," he says, tucking the lighter away. "That's stronger than you think."

Sakura takes another slow drag, and holds the second one in her lungs, still tucked neatly into Shikamaru's space. She takes the cigarette out of her mouth, examining it. 

"I didn't think you were the type to like grass," she says. Her green eyes flick to him, razor sharp and intelligent. "But now that I think about it, it makes sense."

"They're Isamu's," he replies. "I usually only like tobacco. But these are sweeter."

She smiles at him, returning the cigarette to her mouth. 

"They are," she hums. "Would you like a drag?" 

He shrugs a shoulder, and Sakura turns her hand around to put the cigarette to his mouth. He wraps his lips around it, letting them brush the smallest bit against her fingers. He breathes in; her pupils dilate. 

They'll get in an obscene amount of trouble with Hanako for fucking outside of business hours, and on the verandah no less. Knowing that doesn't stop him from taking his mouth off the cigarette. He puts a hand on her cheek, and she allows it. His lungs are burning with the smoke, and her eyes are half lidded as he leads their mouths together. 

A slight touch, barely there. Her top lip is wet from licking it moments before contact. He breathes out the smoke into her mouth. She breathes in, and out again. Their eyes catch each other, and he can see want written leisurely all over her face. 

Shikamaru is pleasantly surprised to find that he wants, too. 

Then, there are footsteps. Intentionally loud ones. The both of them pull back by centimeters at once, until Shikamaru has enough space to smile. 

"What a drag," he says. 

Sakura sticks the smoke back in her mouth and gets to her feet. She turns, pulling her hair over her shoulders, and it gives Shikamaru a view of back muscles that put his own to shame. 

"Take care, Shikamaru-san."

And then she is gone. As soon as she disappears, the owner of the footsteps pokes his head out of the open doors. 

"Shika-kun," Nobu says, a kind look on his face. "Your pack-a-day-man is here."

* * *

Seeing Asuma is the closest Shikamaru can possibly get to coming home. He's been a good contact for inside of the village, running interference between him and the Uchiha and getting paid by the noble clan handsomely to do so.

He only comes in the day time, and is a rare exception to Hanako's usually strict rules. All of Shikamaru's regular clients are older men, who show exceptionally good behavior. It gets them privileges that not every other patron of Fukiage is allowed.

But not enough of them.

Shikamaru is well aware of the fact that Yoshiaki is out in the garden, watching them to ensure that nothing awful goes on. It's a well established fact that sometimes, Shikamaru's patrons will come just to play a game of shōgi with him, and will pay him for it, no sexual favors attached.

But Shikamaru is expressly affectionate to none of his clients, so he cannot be affectionate to Asuma as well.

"Shiromaru," Asuma says, not holding it against him, "it's good to see you."

"Yoroi," he replies. "It's good to see you again."

Asuma sits down opposite him, and chuckles at the already prepared board. 

"Were you expecting me?" he asks. 

"Not at all," Shikamaru replies, not bothering to stand in an attempt to keep up his front. "I was hoping to play with another new friend of mine."

Asuma lifts an eyebrow, and produces a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. He tosses them up into the air, and Shikamaru catches them. He smiles, running his fingers over the plastic still covering the packaging; cloves, his favorites. 

"A new friend?" Asuma asks. "You hate meeting new people."

"What can I say?" Shikamaru brings the pack of cigarettes to his teeth, and tears the plastic open. "I'm a sucker for a pair of wise eyes."

Asuma chuckles at that, and lights his own cigarette. 

"Tell me about yourself, Yoroi," Shikamaru says, tearing away the wrapper and sticking it under the cushion he sits on. "It's been a while."

His mentor shrugs a shoulder, and idly begins a game of shōgi they both know Shikamaru will win. 

"The little missus is getting antsy with me away so long," he laments. "You know how it goes."

It had been some time since Shikamaru's last report to Uchiha Mikoto, and she wanted an update on the situation at the teahouse. 

Shikamaru sucks his teeth and taps a cigarette out of the pack. He lights up, closing his eyes and moving his hair out of his face. 

"No," he says, breathing out smoke. "I really don't."

"I wouldn't expect you to," Asuma replies, easy as the sunshine that makes the day. "But she would like to know who's responsible for keeping me away."

Shikamaru shrugs a shoulder, scratching at his temple. He moves a rook forward. 

"She should know that it takes a man a long time to arrive home after a journey."

Asuma scoffs. 

"You try telling that to a woman like her, see how far it gets you."

"I've said it to my mother."

"And I'm sure she's kicked your teeth in for it."

That makes him chuckle, which was clearly Asuma's intention. His teacher relaxes minutely, and that lets Shikamaru feel a little more at ease. He knows he's been living on Uchiha money for a good long time; all of his clothes, his pins, his false papers, his identity, all of it was paid for with funds smuggled out and back into the village.

The longer he's in the field, the easier it will be for all of this to blow up in their faces. And then where would they be, Sasuke and Shikamaru both?

"It's easier to point fingers," Shikamaru says idly, "than to know the person that's done you wrong is right in front of you the whole time."

Asuma hums, tugging at his goatee as he examines his next move. 

"She doesn't think I'm having an affair with her mother, if that's what you're saying."

The Sandaime had been ruled out as a culprit, that was true enough. And there were few other people in the village with the financial resources to fake a child's death, only to have him raised in a brothel miles away from his home. 

"Has she considered one of her aunts?"

The Elder's Council members were nearly all students of the Shodaime and the Niidaime. All of them were members of the mission that saw the Niidaime's demise. They were remnants of an era of warfare much different than that practiced today. And holding a single, beloved child hostage so that a family danced when they were told to dance, was an option that only an old war hawk would latch on to. 

Asuma's expression doesn't shutter. Instead, he drops his hand down to move a piece, then lifts it back up and keeps mulling over his next move. 

"If you're going to accuse her beloved aunties of having relations with her husband, you know you'll need proof."

"Proof," Shikamaru grumbles. 

Shinobi were explicitly good at not leaving behind proof. That was part of the point. The persimmon tea had been an incredibly lucky coincidence, and even then, that was only because whoever Sasuke's patron (and probable kidnapper) was, was someone who knew that even if the Uchiha came after Sasuke, they still wouldn't be able to take him. 

It's a damn good plan, because Shikamaru is well aware that even if the Uchiha came down en masse to drag Sasuke out of Fukiage, they still wouldn't be able to. Not with the leverage Sasuke's patron had over the clan. 

Shikamaru sighs, and sucks on his cigarette. Any of the Niidaime's students could have inherited his particular distrust of the Uchiha. He may not have liked the clan, but at least he had been willing to work with them. Shikamaru may have been a kid while most of the nonsense was happening, but he knew that unlike the other clans, the Uchiha were sequestered more firmly in their compound. 

It didn't smack of intended discrimination, but it did speak of certain people in power positioning the Uchiha in a place where they could be easily monitored. Shikamaru doesn't remember much from the times he's had to sit in on Clan Council meetings, but he knows one thing; the elders are the most paranoid, twitchy, diabolically mean motherfuckers in the village. And he's counting the Hyūga. 

But Shikamaru wasn't convinced that the entirety of the council would come up with such a plan. Perhaps they would all cosign it, but something as risky as faking the death and stealing the second son of the Uchiha? That needed a measure of plausible deniability, so that if the plan ever went up in smoke, only one person went down and power stayed centralized with the other two. 

The only problem was which one. 

"Maybe when the auntie comes down and grabs you by your ear, that'll be your proof," he mumbles. 

Asuma chuckles at him, folding his arms across his chest.

"That'd be the day," he muses. 

"It would indeed."

The conversation dulls into silence as the game of shōgi wears on. Asuma sucks away one, then two, then three cigarettes. Shikamaru only takes down to, chain-smoking off of Asuma's. 

"Who's that ugly granny with the bad eyes?" Shikamaru asks, after about ten minutes of silence. 

Asuma looks up, in the middle of capturing a decoy. His expression closes off just the smallest bit. 

"You think she's the one I'm running away to?" he asks. 

Shikamaru puts out his last cigarette on the ash tray just beside the shōgi board. 

"I think if any auntie hates your little missus, it'll be that one."

Asuma rubs a hand over his face. It's discreet the way he does it, because he performs a single name in field sign as he draws his hand down over his goatee. All Shikamaru does is nod. 

Asuma sighs, clearly unhappy with the revelation, and with Shikamaru's hunch. 

"How are you so sure it's her?"

Shikamaru shakes his head. 

"A lady never reveals her secrets," he replies. 

He could send his own coded messages back to Mikoto. And if Sasuke's patron was who he thought it was, giving that kind of information to a third party that didn't explicitly need it was more trouble than it was worth. 

Asuma was his teacher, his friend, his comrade, and ally. But he was also only a messenger of information from the Uchiha, not back to them. 

"If anyone is in bed with her man, it's the auntie with the bad eye."

Asuma lights another cigarette; it is clear that he notices the distinction. 

"She'll want proof," Asuma says, too low and too sad for the summer day around them. "She'll need hard proof."

Shikamaru wants to curse. Hard evidence? That meant witnesses, and lots of them. Witnesses and a heinous act to witness. It meant something deplorable happening to Sasuke, and people who could identify the person doing those things. 

He had hoped he would have been able to spare the brat at least that much. But this clearly meant that Mikoto was going to put the full weight of the Uchiha clan behind a full scale attack on whoever it was that stole Sasuke and put him in Fukiage. They couldn't wage that attack if Shikamaru didn't have a name, and if he didn't have proof, evidence, and witnesses to corroborate it.

It was at once excellent and awful news.

Asuma looks up at Shikamaru and offers him a game smile, but there is something pained in the crinkle of his eyes. Asuma has a daughter now, little Mirai, and a son on the way. He is one of the few parents in his year, and if anyone can, he can empathize with the pain of Mikoto's loss.

That is the reason why she chose him for her messenger.

"What do you want me to do?" Shikamaru asks. "Help her catch you two in bed together?"

Asuma's gaze is all at once terribly serious, and all the light fun of that morning's flirtation is sucked out of Shikamaru just like that. He lights another cigarette, suddenly needing something to do with his hands. 

"If you can," he says, "that might be your best bet."

Shikamaru drums his fingers on his new pack of cigarettes, the smoke in his mouth suddenly tasting far more bitter than it had before.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there's a wink and a nod to amako's samurai verse in here; tell me if you found it!  
> there's also a really ridiculously roundabout reference to hashirama in here as well.


	5. Chapter 5

The days are short and the nights are long. Sakura gets the hang of things, settles into the teahouse well enough that after her first week, Hanako gives her a wink and a grunt and tells her she can stay as long as she needs. 

She saves the money she's given, only spending it on things she needs. She gets some new clothes, strays away from blacks and reds of her family. She picks up more dark blues and greens that seem to be more popular in this part of Fire Country. 

It helps her blend in. One of the girls tells her she looks like a tree with her brown hakama and her green haori, her pink hair pulled back. Sakura rolls her eyes, but she lets the joke slide. She came from a family of people named after flowers, after trees. It certainly isn't the first time she's heard the joke.

Still. It's easy work. Comfortable work. It isn't often that she has to throw someone out of the teahouse, but it happens often enough that she can stay on her toes. None of the people she has to hurt pose too much of a threat. Some look at her like she's insignificant, but Sakura has always been looked at that way. She uses it to her advantage. 

The other men call her 'Bitch-sama' or 'Bitch-chan' to tease her, and Sakura hides her smiles in the back of her hand. Some of the girls take to calling her that as well, and she becomes kind of a threat in the teahouse. It's funny. She's never had a nickname before, especially not one as rude as the one she's accidentally given herself. 

Naruto, who starts coming to the teahouse  _nightly_ thinks it's obscene that she lets herself be called something so crass. 

"You're a proper girl, Sakura-san," he says, "a  _samurai_. You shouldn't let people call you that!"

Sakura lifts an eyebrow, patting him down as she does whenever he shows up. They've taken to doing two pat downs, one outside the teahouse and one inside just before the patrons get to the entertaining rooms. 

Naruto has taken to showing up earlier and earlier. Hanako allows it, because Naruto has Uzushio money to throw around. He's let it slip to Sasuke that he's going to be around for a month because of some business he has in Konoha. Fukiage isn't too far from the village, the town its nestled in a popular vacation spot. It explained at least, why so many men and women who were clearly shinobi passed through. 

Sakura understood that much. Some of the men when they came home from their assignments took the town women to bed to help settle them before they returned to their families. Their wives and children.

Naruto very clearly isn't married though. He doesn't have the skittishness that married men that come to Fukiage have. He isn't trying to puff himself up, to make himself look more comfortable than he is. It makes Sakura trust him. 

His cousin Karin seems incessantly annoyed by him. 

She's standing outside of the teahouse, eyes narrowed with one hand on her hip as she watches Sakura check his arms for weapons. 

"One of those whores is going to kill you," she calls. 

Sakura clenches her jaw. She's gathered by now that Karin is generally an abrasive woman, but with good intentions. She's got a good head on her shoulders; it's clear she's Naruto's babysitter, in charge of keeping him in line when he isn't busy doing whatever it is he's in Konoha to do.

But she doesn't like the word 'whore', especially when it comes to the Fukiage flowers. It was too jagged around the edges, too unkind. Karin says it like it's precisely what she's supposed to call them. But Sakura has heard it hurled at the women of her town, at her own mother, much less at those who sell sex. 

It occurs to her that she's rapidly becoming protective of her charges. It's probably a good thing, considering she'll be staying here for a while. Sakura doesn't have a plan other than survival, and Fukiage is a comfortable enough place to do it in. 

"Don't be so crass, Karin," Naruto calls over his shoulder. "You'll hurt somebody's feelings."

Karin lifts a red eyebrow, her undercut making the curve of her jaw sharper. If she were less uptight, she'd probably be Sakura's type. She's mean enough for it. 

"And somebody," Karin says, a little edge to her voice, "is going to hurt you."

She knows they're both aware of who Karin is talking about. Sakura waves Naruto through, and Karin stands in the doorway, watching as he goes. They make eye contact, and Karin lifts her chin. She sucks her teeth, then turns on her heel and leaves the way she came with Naruto. 

Sakura has no doubt that Karin never left to buy her perfume the first time Naruto came around. She's positive the other woman is just lurking around the corner, maybe even hiding in the garden, still keeping an eye on Naruto. Sakura's senses are sharp, but she's no shinobi. She's aware that there are things that will escape her. 

To be sure, she'd actually glad that Karin hangs around. It probably meant that if Naruto tried to do anything that would get him in trouble, she'd intervene. It means less work for Sakura, and that she can appreciate. 

"You're early," Sakura says as she leads him back into the teahouse. 

There's still plenty of daylight out. There'll only be a few more hours until twilight when the teahouse will fully open. Naruto's earlier and earlier arrivals would eventually get him in trouble. Sakura was pretty sure one of these days, he'd swing by at first light, just to get a little more of Sasuke's time. 

"I won't be able to be here later tonight," Naruto replies, rubbing the back of his neck. "My mom is coming in from home, and she's kind of important, so I have to meet her when she gets here."

Sakura nods slowly, grateful with how little information Naruto gives her. He's comfortable around her, but he isn't stupid. 

"Follow me," she says, and she leads him through the teahouse. 

When they get onto the back verandah, the soft lilt of the shakuhachi fills the air. The tune it plays isn't melancholy or especially cheerful, but it lifts onto the wind and curls with it, bending with the flowers in the breeze. 

In the garden, there is a small gazebo. There, Sasuke stands, dressed comfortably in a dark blue yukata, the flute to his lips, his eyes shut. 

"He plays like, seven instruments," Isamu had told her once, gnawing on the stick she had eaten her dango off of. "He puts on private performances for his rich old man."

"When he's practicing," Uyeda tells him, dipping his chin into his hand, "it means his man is coming soon. Hanako gives him letters from him, so Sasuke can  _prepare_."

He says the last word with a lewd lick of his lips that made Sakura turn away from him so she could get back to her meal. And now, as she watches Sasuke play the flute, she wonders how long it will be until Sasuke's patron arrives. She's curious about what he's like. If he's so important to Sasuke that he must prepare several days before his arrival, then Fukiage will likely pull out a stop or two to make sure the man enjoys himself. 

When Sakura chances a look at Naruto, he looks positively gobsmacked and in such a way that tugs on Sakura's heart strings. 

 _'Idiot,'_ she thinks. It barely took him a week. 

She leads him to Sasuke, and stands some space away to give them a shadow of privacy. The gazebo was covered on all sides but one, and thin linen curtains billowed in the same breeze that carried Sasuke's music. 

He doesn't stop playing as Naruto approaches. He blinks his black eyes open, but his concentration doesn't break. Sakura watches him hold the gaze until he finishes the song. 

It picks up pace. The song gets sharp, agile. Fierce. He's showing off. Sakura is curious to see if Naruto will figure it out or not. He's preening in front of him, turns his back to Naruto to continue playing. Sakura circles the gazebo. 

No private dates. If even the couplings between flowers and their patrons was monitored, so was an innocent looking tête-à-tête.

The song ends in a frenetic movement. Sasuke moves his flute away from his mouth, and though Sakura can't see everything, she can see the way Sasuke reaches out and snatches the front of Naruto's Uzushio bright shirt and yanks him in. 

"What are you  _doing_ here?"

Naruto lifts a hand to the one holding him, and his voice is kind when he says, "I wanted to see you again."

"You saw me last night."

"And now I'm seeing you this morning."

Sasuke scowls, tries to take his hand back to himself, but Naruto lets his hand glance over Sasuke's wrist, tries to thread their fingers together. Sasuke steps back, building the space between them, but he doesn't let go of Naruto's hand. 

"It is morning for you, isn't it?" Naruto asks. "Since you wake up to get started here late."

Sasuke scoffs, and Sakura can see his flute hang in his other hand. 

"I charge for hand holding," he says meanly. 

Naruto laughs at that, and Sakura is pretty sure that it's true. 

"How much?" Naruto asks. "I'll pay."

"Yeah?" Sasuke returns. "I charge for standing near me."

"I'll pay."

"For looking at me."

"I'll pay."

"For  _breathing_ near me."

"Sasuke."

He narrows his eyes. Sakura tightens her circle on the gazebo. She doesn't think she'll have to intervene. Naruto was a gentle soul from what she had seen. Then again, she's been wrong before. 

"I'll pay," he says again. "You'll bleed me dry, and I don't mind."

Sasuke scowls, and the expression mars his pretty face. 

"That's the daylight talking."

"I'll say it when the sun sets, if you want me to." 

Sasuke yanks his hand away from Naruto's as if burned. He turns away, hands alight with a fine tremble. Sakura watches him try to catch his cool. His black eyes flash, and for a moment, Sakura thinks they might be red. She narrows her eyes at him, but in a moment, she realizes it must be a trick of the light. Sasuke's eyes are black, and he buries his gaze in his hand. 

He rubs at them like he's in pain, and Naruto doesn't reach forward to touch him, to soothe him. Sakura thinks it's the right decision. 

"I want you to leave." 

Naruto takes a further step back, but the sound of it makes Sasuke drop his hand off his eyes. Like he wasn't sure Naruto would do it if he said it. 

Every single night Naruto has come to Fukiage, he has occupied Sasuke's time so thoroughly that one would forget that Sasuke was the prize of the teahouse. One coveted by even the people who weren't attracted to him. Sasuke paid Hanako several times over every time his patron came into town, so he didn't have to take patrons if he didn't want to. And usually, he didn't want to. 

But it's clear from this little interaction, that he isn't used to people stopping when he tells them to, and that makes Sakura stomach turn over in her stomach. 

Sasuke doesn't move, and Sakura widens the distance, tries to give them an approximation more privacy. She feels like she's going to miss something, but Sasuke - He doesn't hold himself with the same animal grace that Shikamaru does, nor with the same pristine discipline that marks Naruto when he walks before he throws himself into a cushion to sit beside Sasuke. But there's a distinct edge to him that tells Sakura he's had to fight for something before. That he's lost, but he's willing to draw blood again if he has to. 

He can handle himself. And if he can't, she will be there. 

"I'll go if you tell me to," Naruto says, voice so soft Sakura nearly can't hear it. "I wanted to come early because I can't be here tonight. I'll be in the village, so - ,"

"So what?" Sasuke asks, throwing a piercing glance over his shoulder. "You didn't want me to get lonely?"

The way Sasuke's face changes is enough to tell her that Sasuke guessed right. Naruto shrugs his shoulders, but stays on the other side of the gazebo, lets Sasuke keep his space. 

"I'll be back tomorrow, or the day after. But I wanted to see you before I left."

Sasuke says nothing. Just stares. She watches him school his expression into something less open, something neutral. 

"I don't need you."

Naruto shrugs a shoulder. 

"You don't need anyone," he replies. "I know that. But I - I need - ,"

"What?" 

Sasuke swarms back into Naruto's space, nostrils flaring, losing his cool all over again after trying to form it back around himself. 

" _What_ do you  _need,_ Naruto? Me?  _Me?"_ he spits. "You can't  _have_ me. I belong to someone else. I'm - ,"

"You belong to you, Sasuke." Naruto's voice is soft. Quiet. Like he's speaking to a wounded animal. "The person that's holding you here doesn't own you."

"The same way your village doesn't own you?" 

He says it to sting, and Sakura can see Naruto stiffen. 

"You don't come and go as you please," Sasuke snaps. "They tell you to jump, you ask how high. They tell you to kill, and you do it. I'm told to roll over and take and I do."

It's the most worked up she's ever seen him, and even now, his voice is muffled. He's trying to stomp down the tantrum that's building in him, and Sakura wonders if she should step in just to help him save face. 

"Let me get you out of here."

And  _that_ is definitely something Sakura isn't supposed to let slide. The others were all either staying in Fukiage indefinitely, or because they had debts that Hanako could help them pay. Some of them were desperate to leave, and some were working their hardest every night to stay. 

But Sasuke's patron did own him, as much as it rankled Sakura to admit it. And someone offering to take Sasuke out from under that unnamed man's thumb is something Sakura needs to report to Hanako. 

"I'll pay. Whatever he has over you, I'll pay double. I can do that. I'm a shinobi, Sasuke, and I'm good at what I do. I'll get you out of here. I'll take you to Uzushio. My mom would _love_ you," Naruto says, and the desperation in his voice is undercut by the laugh he spills when he talks about his mother. "My dad is - well, he's over protective. But I - I want you to come with me. I'll take you away from here. You will never have to think about that man again. Just - Sasuke."

Sasuke squeezes his eyes shut. Something in Naruto's voice hitches upward.

" _Sasuk_ e," Naruto pleads.

His voice gets tighter. Sasuke walked himself right back into Naruto's space, and the flat of Naruto's palm is on Sasuke's cheek, brushing a lock of black hair away from his face. Sasuke bites his hand, digs his teeth in. Naruto doesn't so much as flinch. Sasuke draws blood. 

"What do you want from me?" 

Sasuke's voice isn't desperate. But it's low. Sad. Naruto reaches forward with his other hand, and he cups Sasuke's other cheek. 

"I just want to sit next to you," he says. "To be by your side, for as long as you'll let me." 

Sasuke scoffs, but he stops biting Naruto's hand. 

"That's the daylight talking."

"Maybe," Naruto muses. "But that's a chance I'm willing to take."

Naruto has never taken Sasuke to bed. Has never taken him to the back rooms, has never touched Sasuke more than jostling him, play fighting with him. It makes the moment Naruto presses forward all the more uncomfortably intimate. 

They don't kiss. Naruto presses their foreheads together and looks at Sasuke. Breathes the air that he breathes. And Sasuke must not be used to having something he wants in front of him, because it takes him longer than Sakura guesses it will to close the space between them and press their lips together. 

Sakura will report the talk of buying Sasuke out of the teahouse. But she won't say anything about the kiss, or the way Sasuke's breath changes, stutters. She turns her back and walks further into the garden. 

Naruto was the last person that would hurt Sasuke. She thought she was a decent judge of character. She could spare them five minutes to themselves.

* * *

 She strolls into the garden, hands easy at her sides. She wonders how much of the encounter she can reasonably forget for Sasuke's sake. She feels a kinship with him now that she didn't when she first met him. 

He was another stolen person. Sakura had been owned by her family, by the men in it, until she had overstepped a line. Then, they cast her out. And even now, there are moments when Sakura wonders if she belongs to herself. Was she free, really free from their influence, if she was running from them?

No matter how right she was, how justified in what she did for her mother, her clan still had power over her. She feared them, and so they owned her. 

Sasuke was kept in a different way, but he was kept nevertheless. And she wants him to have something, even if it is something that he isn't supposed to. 

So she walks forward, and counts the seconds. She'll let him have five minutes exactly, and then she'll head back and continue her chaperoning. 

Sakura lets the garden have her. She likes it in there. It reminds her of the spring fields her mother used to walk her through as a child. It's comforting to run her fingers along the bark of trees that are at least as old as she is, and twice as well cultivated as her. She thumbs the petals of a bright blue flower, and misses her mother keenly. 

There's a sharp sound ahead of her, and Sakura narrows her eyes that she's been caught off guard. She turns, follows the sound, and finds a small troupe of other Fukiage flowers and patrons, all of them crowded around a tree with a target hammered into it. 

It's a little clearing, and Nobu stands on the other side of it, firing arrows for the entertainment of the three flowers and their patrons. Shikamaru is there, and an older man has a slim arm around his waist. 

She's comfortable with the fact that Nobu is there to keep an eye on this little excursion. She wasn't informed that this was happening, but if they're there now, then they had arrived before Sakura brought Naruto out. 

She's about to turn around when Shikamaru catches her eye, and a lazy grin curls over his mouth. 

"Sakura-san," he says, lifting a hand to wave her over. "Aren't you an archer?"

Every head turns to look at her, and Sakura tries not to stiffen under the attention. She's never particularly liked being looked at, and if this is a competition like she thinks it is, she isn't very keen on showing off. 

Still, they are looking at her, and so Sakura nods. Nobu beams at her and offers the bow to her. 

"Come and fire a few, Bitch-sama," he says. "If you aren't too busy."

Sakura snorts at him, but she approaches and takes the bow in hand. It's much smaller by far than the ones she's used to, and the light weight takes her a moment to adjust to. There's an entire cache of arrows by Nobu's foot, and Sakura runs her fingers over the feathers of one of them. 

She needs a brace, but Nobu's arms are larger than hers are. One or two won't hurt her too bad, but she knows the skin of her arm will be complaining to her in the morning, or if she has to throw someone out that night.

Sakura looks up at the target where Nobu has already gone over to start removing the loosed arrows. It isn't much. She can get a bulls-eye on that in her sleep. Still, she notches and fires the arrow in the space of two breaths, and it feels good to hear it  _thunk_ deep into the target. 

She gets a titter of polite applause, and Nobu crosses his arms, giving her a lopsided grin. 

"Well that was too easy," he says summarily. He looks around at the flowers and their patrons, and Sakura thinks it's a small wonder he isn't among them himself, instead of playing chaperone. "What do you say we raise the stakes?" 

"Let's see what the young lady can do," an older man says, raising his drink, squeezing the hip of the flower he's with. 

Nobu nods, still grinning. 

"I'm glad you agree."

He wanders over to the picnic basket that's been laid out and picks an apple out of it. Sakura wants to roll her eyes, but then Nobu lifts out a second, and then a third. He begins to juggle them, much to the amusement of those around him, and Sakura catches onto his game quickly. 

"This is a teahouse," she says, notching a second arrow. "Not a circus."

Nobu sticks his tongue out at her, but Sakura presses her lips together and follows his hands. The first apple is thrown out of the sky by her arrow, and is buried behind Nobu's head in the target. The second follows the first. The third apple, Sakura adjusts her angle, and when the arrow flies, it splits the apple in half.

Nobu catches the pieces, and the flowers and patrons applaud as he takes a bite out of one of them. 

"What magnificent aim!"

"Sakura-san, do it again!"

She's beginning to feel like a pet being asked to roll over. 

Nobu digs out the other arrows and returns them to Sakura, hacking off the apples with an expert hand that doesn't damage the arrowhead. He hands out slices to the others, and picks up an orange. He fiddles at it with his knife, and gives Sakura a saucy wink. Nobu's got a plan, and it probably involves making a fool out of her more than he already has already. He throws it into the sky in a wide arc, and Sakura follows it with one squinted eye. 

When the arrow connects, the orange splits into its pre-sliced pieces, and they rain from the sky. The flowers and patrons let out a cheer, holding out their hands to catch the fruit as it falls. 

"Alright," Nobu says, clapping along with them. "I think you've proved your point."

Sakura shrugs her shoulder, but she does feel a little proud. The flowers already looked at her with respect, but now their gazes are appreciative. It's a strange surprise to catch some of them looking at the corded muscle on her exposed arms. She had rolled back her sleeves for the sake of not accidentally ruining her new clothes, and she knows that when there are whispers, at least some of them are about her. 

It's so strange, to be wanted. To be looked at. 

"Is there anything you can't do with that bow?" an older woman asks, lifting an eyebrow. "You're a regular onna-bugeisha."

"Or a shrine maiden!" 

The laughter comes back again, and it snaps Sakura's good mood in two. And how strange it was to be laughed at. She resigns herself to leaving. She already knows that she's given Sasuke and Naruto more than the five minutes she promised them. She ought to head back. 

"I have an idea."

Shikamaru's voice slips through the din. He walks out of the arm of his patron, and lifts his arms to tie his hair at a high tail on top of his head. His face looks sharper that way, impossibly so. 

He stands with his back against the tree, arms lax at his sides. 

"Can you let my hair down for me?"

An awed hush goes over the crowd. Shikamaru's patron reaches out for him, and some of the other patrons are similarly concerned. Nobu gives Sakura a speculative look, and Sakura purses her lips. 

"I can do it."

Nobu lifts an eyebrow, but he stands right by Shikamaru. He'll be able to administer first aid if all else fails. To be frank, Sakura is surprised he seems willing to let her try. 

Maybe he doesn't like Shikamaru. 

"You break it, you bought it," Nobu says, shrugging a shoulder. 

Sakura knows that there is no use boasting in skills you do not have. She knows she can cut Shikamaru's hair tie. And she gets the feeling that Nobu knows as well. 

"Don't breathe," Sakura says, and she lifts the bow a final time. 

Her fingers brush against her lip on their way back to her cheek, and the people around them go quiet. Shikamaru looks at her like even if she failed, he would walk away completely unscathed. Something in Sakura boils to snap that cool of his in half. 

She adjusts her aim, waits while a breeze rolls through the garden, shaking the flowers hanging from the branches. The breeze stops, and Sakura doesn't hold her breath. She can hear the sharp intake that some of them suck in when she looses the arrow. Sakura does not falter. 

The arrow burrows into the tree behind Shikamaru. He doesn't flinch. He takes a step forward, one slow foot in front of the other, and though there's some tension in his neck as he moves forward, his hair springs free, flowing down his shoulders when he gets far enough away. 

Buried in the target is the arrow, Shikamaru's hair tie poking out from it.

The twinge in her wrist is deeply uncomfortable, but the raucous applause that rises makes Sakura smirk. She isn't really the show-off type, but it's good to gloat at the people that had only just ben rude to her. 

"Nice shot," Shikamaru says, as he approaches her. 

"Thank you," she replies. A smile curves across her face as she hands the bow back to Nobu. "You're good at staying still."

He gives her a slow wink, and his patron appears from nowhere, and wraps an arm around his waist. 

"He certainly is," the man says, nosing at the skin on Shikamaru's throat. 

He leads him away in plain view, and Nobu thumps Sakura on the shoulder. She nods and follows them. She sincerely hopes that Sasuke is the type to scream if he's being murdered. She wasn't expecting having so much on her plate with the before-hours meetings. 

She follows at a safe distance, slowing down, and ducking behind trees as she does. She's well aware that Shikamaru probably knows she's following them, and then again, his patron probably does as well. Neither of them are stupid, and both of themselves have that way about them. That way that Sakura likes. 

She doesn't hear it when they stop, so she walks forward, fans out. She catches sight of Shikamaru's typical green yukata and relaxes. He doesn't see her beyond the man pressing into his space, hooking a thumb onto his lip and biting at his mouth. 

"I've never seen you that interested in a woman before," the man says, pressing his thigh between Shikamaru's. 

Shikamaru smirks faintly, but the man mouths at his throat, biting sweet little marks there, and the soft sound that Shikamaru lets out makes something coil in Sakura's stomach. 

"You like her, don't you?" 

The man's hands are quick, deftly tugging Shikamaru's yukata down over his shoulders so his arms are free. They're toned, pale from spending so much time inside, and there's a pale sheen of sweat on Shikamaru's throat that can't be from what they're doing. 

"You  _want_ her, don't you?" 

The man hikes his knee up, presses it against where Shikamaru is starting to tent. He moans, low and filthy, and Sakura has to hold her breath. She watches the man hold Shikamaru's throat, and there is something in that hold that makes her take a step forward and - 

Shikamaru sees her. His pupils are blown wide in his dark eyes, and he gives her a subtle shake of his head. 

"Do you think she'd be good? Or would she want to own you like I do?" 

Shikamaru breathes and it sets Sakura's nerves at ease. The man is making easy work of tugging at Shikamaru's thin clothes, trying to get him naked even though he's pinned against the tree. 

"Answer me." 

He punctuates it with a light squeeze, and Shikamaru's eyes flutter back. 

"Own me," he says, baring his teeth when the man's thigh rises against his erection, hissing at the friction. "She'd - She'd own me."

Sakura doesn't know if that's true or not, but the way Shikamaru says it makes her want to try.

The man holding him chuckles into Shikamaru's throat. He lifts his free hand to his mouth and he licks a flat line against it before he flicks up the skirt of Shikamaru's yukata, and wraps his fingers around his cock. 

Shikamaru sighs like he's been waiting for it, bucking into the touch. 

"You'd like that wouldn't you?" the patron asks. "If it was her out here. I bet you wish my hands were hers."

Shikamaru tries to shake his head, but the man's grip is firm and doesn't allow much movement. He sucks in a shallow breath, and Sakura can see his toes curl, his fingers follow suit. 

"No," he pants. "You - I - Jin, just you - ,"

"Don't lie," the man, Jin purrs. "You know I don't mind."

He bites a way down Shikamaru's throat, ones that leave Shikamaru shuddering, head tilted back. Jin turns Shikamaru's head this way and that, holding him still as he bites collarbones and the taut skin around Shikamaru's nipples. 

"You know I like it when you don't get what you want."

And that makes Shikamaru groan. Sakura's mouth feels dry. Shikamaru hiccups in a breath, hips moving forward into Jin's grasp. He lets out a little whine when Jin moves away. Hands come off his throat and his cock, and Shikamaru stands there, bruises purpling at his throat, green fabric loose around his shoulders, his cock red and weeping and exposed. 

"All fours," Jin says, and Shikamaru complies. 

There's no grace to it, none that he usually carries himself with, and Sakura wonders if he's that far gone, or if he's putting on a show. All the flowers put on different airs depending on their patrons, and it was entirely possible that this was one of the many faces Shikamaru wore for his.

Shikamaru gets on his hands and knees, and Jin tugs the skirt of his yukata over his ass so that its bare to the warm breeze. He drags his fingernails over the exposed skin on Shikamaru's shoulderblades, down, down, and then up again, pressing on Shikamaru's shoulders until his back is bowed. 

He presses his cheek into the soft grass beneath him, and Sakura is grateful he can't see her anymore. He makes such a  _sight_. 

"Would she touch you like I do?" Jin asks, wrapping his hand back around Shikamaru's cock. "Or would she make you touch yourself?"

He holds him down while he strokes him, and Shikamaru shudders. There'll be dirt on his cheek when he gets back up. Sakura feels her own breath change in her body, feels liquid heat pool between her thighs. She has to watch, doesn't she? If she turns away, if she can't see Shikamaru nod at her for help, how will she be able to intervene if something goes wrong?

She licks at her lower lip, watching him dig his fingers into the soft ground beneath him. 

"Do you think about it?"

Jin lowers his mouth to Shikamaru's ass, and mouths at it. He leaves more bites than anything else; sharp nips and mouthfuls of flesh that leave indents against pale skin. Shikamaru yelps at some of them, keens at others. He's caught between thrusting forward into Jin's hand and pushing back against his mouth. 

"Needy," Jin says, voice a low rumble. "That didn't take you long. Does she get you that hot?"

He uses one hand to spread Shikamaru's thighs, and Shikamaru sighs with it. Jin chuckles and lowers his mouth to the skin he's shown light to, and Sakura wants to  _see_. 

"Answer me." 

"Yes."

And there's no hesitation this time. No waiting. 

"She does," Shikamaru groans. "She does, she  _does_."

Jin drags his tongue over Shikamaru's hole, and Shikamaru's mouth goes slack around the words, repeats them like a mantra in time with how Jin strokes him. ' _She does, she does, she does, she does, she does.'_

"Do you want to say her name?" 

Shikamaru groans, but he doesn't answer. Jin leans back from where he mouths at him, and Shikamaru whines at the loss. 

"Say her name, Shiro," he says. "Or I'll stop." 

Shikamaru lifts his head the barest bit, turns it so he isn't staring to the side. He looks at her, and he looks - Poets can't describe it. His mouth is red from where he's bitten his own lips, and there's a bit of dirt on his temple, but he looks at Sakura like he needs her holding him, licking him. 

"Sakura," he whispers. 

And the way he says it lets her know. It's an act. All of it. It shatters the heat between her legs, makes her flush with embarrassment. Her nipples had perked, formed hard little mounds underneath her shirt, and she feels so foolish - 

" _Sakura."_

Jin eats at him in earnest, spreading his spit over Shikamaru's hole. The quiet of the garden gets lost to the wet sound, the sound of skin on skin, of moans rumbling in Shikamaru's chest. Jin does something that makes Shikamaru press back, searching for more, and Sakura feels like she should run, like she isn't a part of this and - 

"Fuck,  _Sa - Saku - ,"_

"You see her, don't you?"

Jin pulls away from Shikamaru's ass looking sloppy around the mouth, and Shikamaru doesn't look much better. She wonders if he usually lasts this long, or if this is a special occasion. 

"Don't you?"

Shikamaru swallows, holds her gaze, and says. "Yes."

"Say her name." 

Jin pulls his cock out of his trousers, and it's longer than Shikamaru's, but arousal makes it point upward. He presses forward, closes Shikamaru's thighs, and slides it between them. 

"Say it while I fuck you."

Jin grabs a handful of Shikamaru's hair and pulls. It exposes the bruise covered line of Shikamaru's throat, and his brown eyes are clouded in his head. He doesn't break eye contact with Sakura, even as Jin fucks the little space between his thighs. 

"I won't tell you a third time." 

Sakura watches Shikamaru make the decision. He puts a hand on himself where's leaking, dribbling pre-cum on his own belly. He gives himself one sharp pull, and he whines. She watches Jin's cock move between his thighs, appearing and disappearing, and there are too many places to look. 

"Sakura."

He whines her name like he wants her behind him, wants her hands to be the ones touching him. She feels floored, like she can't stay and she can't walk away, and Shikamaru stares her down, all the desperation in the world in his eyes as he pulls at himself, closing his fist around the head of his cock, thumbing the slit, and stroking back down. 

"Sakura," and he drags out the 'a' like it's something sweet in his mouth. 

"Ask her if you can come." 

He licks his bottom lip, and Jin slows his pace. His cock presses up against Shikamaru's balls, and Sakura watches, rapt as it makes Shikamaru bite his lip around another moan. 

"Sakura," he breathes. "Sakura, can I?"

"Say please."

Jin tugs him back further by his hair, and the look on his face is focused, though he's losing himself, too. His pace quickens, and Sakura can tell he's closer than Shikamaru is. 

"Please, Sakura," Shikamaru groans, his brown nipples hard, sweat shining on his sternum.

She wants to put her mouth there, wants to tease, to pinch at the already punished skin. She wants like she did the other day when he teased her, when she poured smoke into his mouth and held back because this was a  _job_ not a - a - 

"Sakura, _let me come_."

A spirit must possess her to mouth 'Yes', because when she does, Shikamaru's eyes widen more than she ever thought they'd be able to. Like he wasn't expecting her to do it. 

She whispers it, because she knows he can hear her. His man might not have seen her, might not have heard her coming, but Shikamaru was more than that man was, and she knows he will understand. 

" _Come for me."_

She watches his balls tighten, watches him pull harder, watches his fist curve tighter around himself, and when he comes, it's on a shout in the shape of her name. She wonders if that's what Jin likes. 

He continues, fucking Shikamaru's thighs until he spends himself on Shikamaru's chest. And when he's done, he turns Shikamaru over and licks the mess up himself. Sakura watches Jin redress him, watches him help Shikamaru stand, and she walks behind them as they head back to the garden party. 

When they reconvene, she nods to Nobu, and takes her leave. As she turns to go, she sees Shikamaru watch her go, and she feels his eyes on the back of her neck as she disappears, to continue her watch over Naruto and Sasuke.

* * *

She leaves them under Rokuro's watch in the teahouse and heads upstairs to prepare for the coming night. 

It's an excuse. 

Sakura reclines on her bedroll, slips two fingers into herself, and shuts her eyes, imagining the way Shikamaru shuddered as he came, his eyes shut, crying out her name.

* * *

 

The night is somehow easier to get through. Uyeda's a trouble magnet, and before the night is even a handful of hours underway, there's a shouting match over who gets to bed him first. 

Sakura isn't even on patrol inside the teahouse, but she hears the commotion and she makes it her problem. She's always been good at butting in her nose where it doesn't belong. 

There are only two patrons fighting, and Uyeda looks prim, pleased as punch between them. Shikamaru is watching with a visibly bored expression. Sasuke is nowhere to be seen, probably up in his rooms sulking. 

Rokuro intervenes first, making to separate the men, but the one of them throws his beer bottle. It sails in a wide arc that hits a kunoichi on her back. The glass doesn't shatter, but the woman stands and cracks her knuckles. 

And then the riot happens. 

Sakura turns to get Nobu, well aware that several fighting people in one room can't exactly be contained by herself and Rokuro. But the din inside already catches his attention, and Nobu is inside moments after the first punches are thrown. 

"Get the flowers out," Nobu tells her, squeezing her arm. 

Sakura resents being bossed around, but she can take an order. It isn't about guts or glory. There are bottles flying, and if one of the flowers gets hurt, the teahouse will be shut down for the night. Someone wouldn't get the money they needed, someone would be hurt, and Hanako would be livid. 

Sakura was pretty damn close to livid herself. 

She skirts around the edge of the room, offering her body as shelter for the flowers that are too close to the fight to get out on their own. Some of them shudder beneath her, but others follow her suit, helping those who haven't seen a riot in the teahouse get out before it gets too ugly. 

In a moment, Sakura's instincts screech at her to look up, and she turns just in time to see a woman, clearly thinking Sakura is escaping with a prize, raise an empty bottle of sake to throw down against Sakura's head. 

Sakura reaches out with one hand, shoving away the flower in her arms with the other. She's ready to grab the woman's arm, when the woman suddenly goes stiff. Her hand opens in an unnatural movement of bone, and the bottle falls to the ground, useless. The kunoichi looks confused, enraged, but as soon as the stiffness comes, it disappears. Sakura clocks her hard enough to put her on her ass, and the kunoichi doesn't get back up. 

She looks around the room, well aware that no one got a muscle spasm that intense in the middle of a fight. Adrenaline carried you if it came down to it. She looks at the woman on the ground, and something black flickers at the edge of her vision. 

There is a shadow crawling across the floor, attaching to some and disappearing from others. The rioters drop their makeshift weapons when it touches them, giving openings for flowers to escape, and for guards to strike. 

The shadow quivers, and pools at Shikamaru's feet. 

Sakura knows better than to stare. She lets her gaze rest lightly on him, and then lets it be occupied with the servant girl she drags to her side. Rage fumbles sharp and hot in her throat. 

The riot ends, and Sakura helps Nobu and Rokuro throw the offenders out of the teahouse. And when she's finished, she tries to keep her breath under control as she heads back inside.

A shinobi. Shikamaru is a shinobi and Sakura isn't sure of how she's supposed to feel. Undercover, in all likelihood, and that thought makes her stomach clench. The last time she interacted with an undercover shinobi hadn't been so pleasant.

She understands now, his thinly veiled attraction to her. His request to meet him, the cigarette, the kiss in the smoke, offering himself to her arrow, saying her name while a patron fucked him; he was manipulating her. He wanted a guard in his pocket, someone who was armed and had access to every part of the teahouse. She is livid with herself, that she had been fooled so expertly. Her father would frown at her, her mother would shake her head. Her grandfather would slap her in the face.

She wants to put her fist through the wall, but she knows there isn't time for such a show of temper. She presses her tongue to the roof of her mouth and forces herself to breathe.

The commotion in the teahouse dies down, and it takes some time for the world inside of Fukiage to right itself. Sakura goes on her rotations, prowling more than walking, briskly patting down men and women who seek entrance. She's only slightly surprised Hanako didn't shut the joint down for the night all things considered.

Sakura waits.

Her chance comes nearly four hours later, when Shikamaru returns from the back rooms, his patron just ahead of him, dabbing at the corners of her mouth with her fingers. Shikamaru looks easy as he always does, like the fact that he just got his cock sucked is of the least importance to him. Where this indifference originally piqued Sakura's interest, now it only makes her angrier.

She passes by the patron and stands directly in Shikamaru's path. She knows she will get in trouble for this, but she's well aware that Hanako will forgive her if her hunch is correct, and Shikamaru is the spy Sakura thinks he is.

Shikamaru lifts an eyebrow at her, but doesn't try to side step to get around her.

"I said the last time you were off duty, Sakura-san," he drawls, a casual smirk on his face.

She tries not to let her rage froth over, to spill into her fists. Instead, she smiles the way her mother taught her to do when a man wronged her: beautifully.

"I am off duty," she says. "Double interior patrols since the little uprising. But Nobu is solo on exterior."

Shikamaru leans against the wall beside them, one hand on his hip. The other reaches out and lightly rests on Sakura's lower lip. Her face is flushed not with embarrassment, not with coquettish charm, but with the weight of her anger at being made a fool. 

"Can't wait?" he asks. 

Sakura darts out her tongue and licks the tip of Shikamaru's thumb. His eyes track the movement.

"Can you?" she returns. "You seemed pretty eager when you were screaming my name earlier."

Shikamaru's dark eyes impossibly darken, and where want once pooled in Sakura's stomach, anger floats still. Shikamaru looks at her, then jerks his head. 

"Let's go inside then."

He lets go of her, and she follows him inside. She's still armed with the knives in her sleeves, even if he manages to get her swords off of her. There was no way Hanako would allow a shinobi in the teahouse. They attracted trouble, or they were looking for it. And if Shikamaru was there to lure someone, he was only putting the other flowers in danger. 

She'd had a hard time rationalizing what she had to tell Hanako about Naruto and Sasuke, but this? This would be cake.

She walks in after he opens the door for her, and Sakura listens to him as he shuts it behind himself. 

"For whatever it's worth - ,"

She doesn't let him finish. Sakura has two flat knives between her hands, and she throws both, aiming for the face. Shikamaru's eyes widen, but he listens to his instincts. 

He catches them. It damns him more than the ninjutsu he showed earlier. 

"What are you doing in Fukiage?" she demands. 

Shikamaru is silent. He holds her knives, testing their weight. Sakura thumbs at her sword, ready to block them if he throws them back at her. He's quiet for a moment, weighing his options. He looks like he's thinking a mile a minute. 

"Hanako doesn't know about you," Sakura says, not drawing her sword all the way. "If she did, she would have told me when she offered me a permanent place here."

She doesn't move, knows that circling him, caging him in isn't a good idea. She's got no clue how strong Shikamaru is. And she realizes now that she's gone in without a plan, just like she did when those men hurt her mother, just like the night she bathed herself in blood and discarded the Hōjō name. 

She always was hotheaded. 

"What gave me away?" 

His voice sounds humored rather than upset, and Sakura can begrudgingly respect it. Most men that were faced with her in a fight talked down to her as if they knew they would win the spar. Shikamaru talks like he isn't concerned with something so trivial. 

Like he's probably thinking about how to get her corpse out of the room before anyone notices her throat's been cut. 

"Your shadows," Sakura spits. "You got sloppy."

Shikamaru chuckles, and rubs a hand against his chin. She can see the high bruises on his throat from where Jin bit into him. Watches him draw his hand up behind his head and sigh. 

"What a drag."

Sakura narrows her eyes, because that isn't really the typical response, is it? 

"You caught me," he says, shrugging a shoulder.

He looks like he's come to a conclusion of some kind. He pins her with his dark gaze and drops her knives. They clatter loudly on the ground.

"Tell me why you're here or I'll scream the safe word."

There were two men on interior rounds tonight. One of them would hear her, and they would come. She isn't sure of who they'd believe first, but the flowers all have a high opinion of Sakura. Nobu seemed to like her. Rokuro did as well. 

Shikamaru doesn't narrow his eyes, but he does fold his arms across his chest. 

"Reconnaissance," he says, voice clipped, "and retrieval."

Sakura lifts an eyebrow, and doesn't take her hand off her sword. 

"Of who?" 

Shikamaru smirks in that easy way of his and it makes Sakura want to cut him just so he'll have something to be serious about. 

"Someone you gave a little to much privacy to today."

She draws her sword, livid. She's always had a terrible temper. Her impulse control goes out the window when she's riled up. 

"What do you want with Sasuke?" 

It was a kidnapping. That was what it sounded like. She knew Sasuke was upstairs in his quarters, knew that he wouldn't be coming down for the night. But what if that was the point? What if Shikamaru had a team that was going to steal him away from Fukiage right now?

His patron was rich, that much was true. If someone stole him, they could ransom him. And though Fukiage isn't the best place to be, it certainly wasn't the worst. And the idea of Sasuke being stolen, being  _sold_ , or hurt - 

"His mother hired me to find him."

Sakura blanches, but she doesn't lower her sword. Shikamaru narrows his eyes and walks forward until the tip of her kodachi presses into his ribs. He lifts the blade, slotting it just so, until all Sakura has to do is push hard enough, and a little bit up, and she will puncture his lung. 

He'd choke on his own blood. He knows it. 

"His birth name is Uchiha Sasuke," Shikamaru says. "His patron stole him when he was a child, and brought him here."

Sakura's brain stalls. Uchiha? Anyone would be a fool not to know that name. They were master swordsmen. In the days of the Warring States period, the smiths in her family had fashioned their swords. 

Her brain snaps to the faint glow of red eyes in the gazebo, and Sakura's blood runs cold. The Sharingan. Had she seen the legendary Copy Wheel Eye?

"He's a hostage," Shikamaru explains. "Leverage. I've been hired to bring him back home, and to out his patron. Ferment a little revolution."

He says it so casually, but there's something in the set of his jaw that tells Sakura he's as serious as a heart attack. She gets suspicious. 

"How do I know you're telling the truth?" she asks. 

Shikamaru steps forward, doesn't flinch as her sword cuts through his yukata, and a bead of blood falls onto her weapon. 

"Blood oath."

Sakura's jaw doesn't drop, but it's a close thing. 

"My name is Nara Shikamaru. I'm a shinobi of Konohagakure. My identification number is zero-one-two-six-one-one."

He cocks an eyebrow at her, and his smirk comes back. 

"I'll show my hitai-ate, if you like."

Sakura doesn't want to see it. She believes him, even if it's ridiculous, even if it's insane. But shinobi and samurai were very similar in several ways, and Shikamaru is playing on one that counts. 

Blood oaths were oaths until death. And though part of her says he isn't to be trusted, the other half looks the proof of him standing on her sword in the face and takes his word. 

"You want to get Sasuke back to his family?" she asks. 

Shikamaru nods. 

"His family was told he was dead," he explains. "His mother didn't believe it. She hired me, and I found him. I plan to bring him home."

Sakura sucks her teeth, and realizes now is the time for her to weigh her own options. 

"You tried to seduce me."

Shikamaru shrugs. 

"No hard feelings?" he says. "I needed someone with a sword on the inside. Someone who could reasonably invade Sasuke's room when his patron comes to visit."

Sakura narrows her eyes. 

"You don't know who it is."

"I have a hunch."

"That isn't the same thing."

"But I have an idea,"  Shikamaru presses. "And my ideas? Are generally good as fact."

Sakura takes a chance. She sheathes her sword. Shikamaru rocks back on his heels, puts his hands on his hips. 

"You trust me with this," she says, eyeing him. "Why?"

Shikamaru shrugs. 

"Whatever brought you here wasn't pretty," he says, eyeing her right back. "Family related considering how tight lipped you are about them when anybody asks you. Figured you'd be the type to want to bring someone back to the people that love him, since you can't go back to the ones who love you."

She decks him. Temper, temper. But Shikamaru catches the fist, and squeezes her fingers around it. He lets out a low whistle, and lifts an eyebrow. 

"I'm pretty sure you broke something of mine."

"You have  _no idea_ what you're talking about," she spits, breath heaving. 

"But I'm right."

Sakura yanks her fist out of his grasp and loosens it, forces herself to calm down the way her father taught her. The gravity of the situation weighs heavy on her shoulders. Sasuke was a captive here in a way she hadn't been able to imagine before. He was brought here as a child, torn away from his family as political leverage, and more than Shikamaru's betrayal, more than his false attraction, it makes her blood seethe in her veins. 

Sasuke's mother was still searching for him, even when all else thought he was dead and gone. And Sakura - Sakura thinks of her own mother, lured out on the lie of the danger that Sakura was in, and what happened to her after - 

She sucks in a breath, tries to steady herself. Sasuke's mother looked for her son the way Sakura's mother had looked for her. Sakura wasn't about to let another mother search for nothing.

"Alright," she says, placing her hand, trembling with anger, back on the hilt of her sword. "Alright. I'll help you."


	6. Chapter 6

Shikamaru watches her, her eyes downcast, her whole body shaking with the weight of her anger. He holds his hand gingerly, pressing here and there. That punch he caught definitely broke one of the bones in his hands. He's not Ino, so he can't heal it immediately and he's annoyed for it. He's got great chakra control, but he hadn't tested high enough to be accepted into the healing programs. He'd need to get it set. 

He grimaces; broken hands are a bitch and a half for a shinobi. Shikamaru was one of the few shinobi of his academy graduating class that had made Jounin. But he wasn't a master. He couldn't perform ninjutsu without hand seals. 

If this entire ordeal at Fukiage came down to a fist fight, he was handicapped. He sucks his teeth. He had known that Sakura had an instinctive grasp on how to use chakra. The first night she had handled that drunk was proof of that. But using it to enhance speed and using it to enhance a hit were two completely different things. The speed at least, could be chalked up to adrenaline. The punch? That was all raw feeling. And raw feeling made chakra all the more dangerous. 

It was a wonder she hadn't broken his entire hand. 

"As much as I appreciate the sentiment," he drawls, "this isn't exactly a one way street."

Sakura's bright green eyes snap up to him. There's no hint of confusion in her gaze. Only understanding, and then a terrible kind of steadiness. 

No one gave out information for free. That much could be said for the shinobi and for the samurai. Shikamaru had put his neck on the line by telling Sakura as much as he had; now she had to pony up. 

It was like putting a knife in your enemy's hands. Sakura had enough leverage on him right now to have him kicked out of the teahouse, sent back to Konoha with a failure on his mission history. She needed to give him something in return if she wanted to be a part of this the way Shikamaru could tell she wanted to.

It hadn't exactly been a mistake, his behavior at the riot. Shikamaru had subtly helped quell several during his time at Fukiage. His help had been more physical than anything; hauling the unconscious out of the teahouse when the three guards had their own hands full, tugging other flowers out of the line of fire. He was much more subtle about using his clan techniques. 

In truth, Shikamaru had wanted to be seen. 

Sakura had been a safe bet for weeks. A wild card, sure, but a woman with a sword. Shikamaru was a shinobi. He had long since learned better than underestimating the women that were around him. 

He had watched her, eyes narrowed on her or just over her shoulder. Had cataloged the way she dodged questions about her family, the kind way she was around Sasuke's most common new guest (and what had Shikamaru done in his previous lifetime to make Uzumaki Naruto, the Genzaikage and Uzumaki Minato's firstborn a player in this travesty in Fukiage), the kind way she was around Sasuke himself. 

He had pondered Nobu, Yoshiaki, and Rokuro all in turn but found all of them lacking. Rokuro was loyal to Hanako only. Nobu was more interested in his paycheck than anything else. And Yoshiaki was a spy from River Country himself. Sakura hadn't been there long enough to form ties with Hanako, to put the needs of the teahouse and the flowers within it ahead of her own. 

She was still just close enough to her lost family that she could be played upon. Orphans were drawn to other orphans. Motherless children wanted to protect the motherless. That much, Shikamaru was sure he could play on. 

What he hadn't expected was how willing she was to kill him on Sasuke's behalf. Her protective streak was much wider than he had given her credit for. 

It just went to show that warrior women were the same everywhere; dangerous if they didn't like you, all the more horrifying when they loved you.

He had miscalculated that much. He was a fool for not telling Asume his plans. But he was expecting his teacher in the coming week, and he could tell him all that there was to know about the strange young woman, trembling in front of him. 

"My name," she says, after a long moment of silence, "is Hōjō Sakura."

Shikamaru's jaw doesn't drop, but it's a close thing. 

The Hōjō were master swordsmen, rivaled only by the Hatake and favored by the Uchiha in the old days for crafting their swords. They were a Fire Country clan that had faded into some obscurity after the Hatake joined Konoha. Samurai were stubborn, and though they had tight ties with the Uchiha, the Hōjō had faded into obscurity. 

Until a short number of months ago, when the firstborn daughter of Hōjō Hirotaka, Hōjō Sumire was found murdered and grossly dismembered on the Taira family's residence. Sumire's only daughter had gone missing shortly thereafter, and had been presumed dead as well, both lost in a violent double assassination that left the Hōjō scrambling for new heirs. Only days later, three high ranking men in the Taira family were also found dead.

The news had only reached Shikamaru because Asuma thought it would interest him. He was, as Ino liked to say, a giant nerd loser. Samurai history fascinated him. 

But there were hundreds of ronin out there. When Sakura arrived at Fukiage, how on earth could he have known - ?

"My mother, Hōjō Sumire was -  ."

She stops and Shikamaru is tempted to tell her she doesn't have to continue. The heir to one of the oldest samurai clans in Fire Country is working in a brothel. That's more than enough information to tide him over. But when he opens his mouth to stop her, Sakura only shakes her head. 

"She stepped above her station. She advised her father that transplanting our family to Konohagakure would bring the Hōjō into a golden age." 

Sakura takes a breath to collect herself, to breathe. Her trembling slows to fine tremors in her sword hand, but she doesn't meet Shikamaru's eyes as she continues. 

"My family was in dire straits. Joining a Hidden Village would have bolstered us economically, would have reaffirmed our old ties with the Uchiha, would have opened up new ones with new clans. Our children could have learned to manipulate chakra, our elders could have taught kenjutsu." 

Shikamaru watches, follows her line of thought, stills when he gets there a moment before she says it out loud. 

"She spoke out of turn. In front of representatives of the Taira, Oda, and Totoyomi families," she says, visibly gritting her teeth as she does. "She was ejected from the meeting."

But. There's a 'but' hanging in the air, a turn to this story that will end in the death of Sakura's mother. Shikamaru can feel the air in the room change drastically, can feel the moment when Sakura rolls her shoulders to tell a terrible story.

"My mother was stubborn," she says. "She began sending missives to Konohagakure and to other Hidden Villages in secret. She thought if she got a measure of proof, she could convince my grandfather that she was right." 

"She got some responses," Sakura says, a mean laugh in her throat. "And some of them were intercepted. The Taira have been our enemies since the Warring States era. They wouldn't want to see us thrive, not now or ever."

She loosens her grip around the hilt of the purple kodachi at her hip. 

"She was leaving our lands to meet in person with a Konohagakure diplomat and shinobi." Her voice has the smallest waver in it, one that Shikamaru would have to strain his ears to hear. He's surprised she's told him this much. "They intercepted her with a stolen Oda war hawk. It said that her letters had been intercepted, that I was going to be punished for her actions. My mother turned around and rode hard back home. They captured her on the road."

That was why she had agreed. Why mention of Sasuke's mother had made Sakura's eyes grow wide, made her jaw slacken just the slightest bit. Why she had agreed faster than she had thought to ask more questions. 

Her mother had died for her under false pretenses. Of course Sakura would want to help someone else's mother actually find their child when the child was still alive. 

"The Taira," Sakura says, spitting the family's name like bitter poison, "did  _unspeakable_ things to my mother. They didn't bother hiding that they did it. They sent my grandfather the fingers of her left hand. They sent my father the fingers of her right." She swallows hard, and now it is not apprehension or adrenaline that makes her shake. Now it is rage. "They sent me locks of her hair."

Sakura swallows hard, and Shikamaru watches the bob of her throat. Watches her take on the truth as steady as she can. He can tell by the way she holds herself that she isn't lying. Nothing in this story is pretty enough for falsehood, for decoration. 

"I was told to do  _nothing_ ," Sakura says, biting down hard on the word. "I was told to wait while my grandfather decided what shape justice should take."

Shikamaru lifts an eyebrow. 

"But you didn't."

Sakura stares at him, dead on. He recognizes that strange something in her eyes again. The look of a person that has killed and will do it again, should the circumstances permit. But it's deeper, hollower. It was how Hatake Sakumo carried himself now, deep into his forced retirement. It is a look of terrible, terrible loss. 

"I went to them," Sakura says, voice low, "at dusk, with my mother's hair in my hands. I begged their forgiveness and for the rest of her body. I asked to be taken to the men who kidnapped her. I said that I went on behalf of my clan, and would do anything to recover my mother's corpse."

No shiver runs down Shikamaru's spine. He has heard such stories, and he will hear worse. Still. Still, it is awful to hear. Rarely did one get so deeply intertwined in the killing they had to do in this line of work. It is always worse to care. 

"They took me to an outpost deep into their territory, away from their man house. They thought to do to me what they did to my mother," Sakura says. "They said they were going to take turns." 

Working with the Yamanaka for generations means learning how to compartmentalize. When Sakura tells him that one of her mother's killers took out his cock, and demanded she suck it in exchange for the rest of her mother's body, Shikamaru turns off his feeling-brain and turns on his shinobi-brain. 

She castrated him on the spot. She had not been thoroughly patted down when she entered their family compound. His blood poured into her face, and the two men behind him, palming their own erections through their clothes blanched at her sudden display of violence. 

The castrated man fell, and the other two moved to attack her. She shoved her knife through one's foot to incapacitate him. The third man was her first kill, ever. Then, she killed the man whose foot she stabbed. Then, she killed the man who tried to rape her throat. 

She castrated all of them in the end. Cut out their tongues and replaced them with their still bleeding cocks. She cut off their fingers, and scalped them. She buried their fingers and scalps in the mud of a nearby river, then waded through the water to throw off the scent of any hounds sent her way. Then she left them there to rot. 

She left Taira territory covered in blood. She made it back to her family's lands, and only had enough time to change her clothes before her father was running towards her with her mother's kodachi in hand, telling her to get on the road and run as fast and far as she could. 

She would have been executed. The Taira would have demanded her head, and her own family would have disciplined her for going against a direct order. 

Shikamaru is suddenly aware that he's standing in front of one of the few non-shinobi entries in the Bingo Book. There was no picture of her inside, of course, because pictures of pictures didn't show up well and neither did pictures of portraits. But her name, a bounty, and 'killer of Taira Masahiro, Taira Suizen, and Taira Shige' were all listed. 

A small kill count, but an ugly history. Shikamaru had heard worse. But that was for shinobi. For a samurai - For a samurai, Sakura had a shinobi story. A kunoichi story.

Asuma probably wasn't going to be happy about Shikamaru bringing her into the fray. But if Sumire had met with delegates from Konoha, it was likely that the daimyo knew of her more intimately than the Sandaime did. Shinobi valued following orders, but Konoha was built on the tenant that the village was one big family. Sakura had gotten vengeance for her own. And even though she no longer carried the Hōjō name, her knowledge of their kenjutsu was still invaluable. 

If she helped him, he could get her refugee status. Make her into a Konoha shinobi, if she wanted it. Get her out of Fukiage since it was clear enough this wasn't the place for her.

All things considered, what she's just told him is an even trade. The Nara name meant something this close to Fire Country. If she had a head for numbers, she would have memorized his shinobi ID. Now they had each other by the throat. 

"Alright," Shikamaru says, breathing out slow through his nose. His mouth itches for a cigarette, but now isn't the time. 

Sakura raises an eyebrow at him, her knuckles a little white over the hilt of her purple kodachi. 

"Alright?" she repeats. 

Shikamaru nods. 

"Alright," he says again. "We're even. You said you want to help me, and I need the help." 

Sakura nods hesitantly, accepting. 

"We need hard evidence of who Sasuke's patron is, that is, we need more than one pair of eyes on him," he explains. 

Sakura nods again, more sure this time. 

"We need to wait until the next time Sasuke's patron comes to visit," he says. "When he arrives, we need to create a distraction. One that'll let me get into their private room and identify him."

Sakura purses her lips. 

"And you're sure you'll be able to identify him?" she asks. 

Shikamaru nods, the grim guess floating at the forefront of his mind. 

"I will be," he says. Something in his tone must convince her, because Sakura doesn't question him again. "What I need from you," he continues, "is for you to just keep doing your job. I'll let you know when the time is right."

He can see her tense at that, and Shikamaru can empathize. Though he has Asuma, giving him bits of information and pieces of advice, he's largely on his own out here. Sakura has been alone in a much different way; she isn't used to taking war orders from anyone except for herself. 

But Shikamaru couldn't afford to leave his cards that far away from his chest. He had told Asuma his suspicions, and even that was dangerous. Sakura would have no way to know exactly who Shikamaru suspected was ruling Sasuke's life; the names of those that sat on the Elder's Council weren't common knowledge outside of Konoha. 

He knew she could keep her mouth shut. But Shikamaru was still wary. Good old fashioned shinobi paranoia hadn't failed him yet, even though part of him did want to trust Sakura. 

"Okay," she says instead of pushing. He can't tell if she defers to his authority because she knows he knows better, or if it's because she doesn't want to antagonize her new and only ally. Shikamaru is sure it's a little bit of both. 

He hears new footsteps come down the hall, and his eyes narrow. He thinks fast because he always does. He takes a step forward and Sakura flinches hard, but her sword stays in its sheath. She trusts him, however foolish she is for doing so. 

"Come here," he says, voice low. He takes her by the shoulders and pulls her in close. 

"What are you doing?" she whispers. 

He looks down at her and she looks up at him, confusion and a hint of indignation in her eyes. 

"You need to go soon," he replies. "The night'll be over soon, and you'll need to close up." 

"That isn't an answer to my question."

Shikamaru rolls his eyes. He runs one of his palms up the column of her throat, cups her chin in his hand then tilts it and exposes the long line of her white neck. 

"You need proof you've been here," he mumbles, mouth descending. "A mark is a better alibi than most give it credit for."

His mouth lands high on her throat, where her collars will not cover it. She goes still in his arms, stiff as a corpse. He opens his mouth against her skin, runs is tongue softly over the taste of sweat before slowly, he bites down. 

She releases a sharp breath, but feels her relax as he sucks at the skin. He works it, between his teeth and his lips, feeling her pulse thud just under her skin until he's sure it'll go a bright, offending red. 

He doesn't expect her hands on the back of his head, gentle and calloused even by shinobi standards. He doesn't expect her to tug him back, to look him in the eye, then to put her mouth on his. 

It's clear that it isn't her first kiss. That much is obvious from the way she slants her lips against his, tugs on his lower lip with her teeth, licks her way into his mouth. 

She tugs a little bit on the short hairs at the nape of his neck, and then she presses forward, trailing a string of bitten kisses down the curve of his jaw. She settles at the front of his throat, biting down sharply there, harshly there. Shikamaru knows before she even pulls off that where her bruise will be delicate and red, this one will be a purple welt. 

A decent alibi if anyone had ever seen one. 

He doesn't count on his cock twitching in interest when her fist tightens in his hair. Or on the way his breath hitches in his throat when she runs the flat of her tongue over the newly blemished, sensitive skin on his throat. 

He tries to remind himself that she is only returning the favor. He ignores the shinobi-brain memories that he has of Jin, demanding he say Sakura's name while he fucked Shikamaru into the ground. Ignores the flares of want stirring in him, the urge to drag his hands down her shoulders, to shove through the tidy folds of her haori, to dig his fingernails into the soft skin of her small breasts. 

Her mouth travels back up his neck, settling in a sharp kiss on his mouth before Sakura pulls back. They stare at each other, and Shikamaru clocks the arousal in her half-lidded gaze. Watches her gaze flick from one of his eyes to the other, trying to parse out what he's already discovered. 

She smiles, slow and easy. Shikamaru's stomach falls. Fuck.  _Fuck_. 

"Nice alibi," she says, curving her hand, digging her thumb into the bruise she's left on his throat. "I'll wait for your word."

With that, she turns and exits. He watches her go, mouth feeling raw and pink from Sakura's fiendish teeth. Now she was dangerous for a different reason entirely. 

* * *

 

In the morning, Shikamaru is roused by a hand shaking his shoulder. He is awake when the door opens, but plays possum until Isamu gets to her knees and starts jostling him. 

"Wake up, Shiro," she snaps. "Your Yoroi-san is early, and Uyeda's going to snatch him up if you don't get downstairs."

Shikamaru groans and rolls over onto his back. Isamu gasps, then her jabs at his side turn into open handed strikes. 

"What is that?" she whisper-screams. 

Shikamaru suffers her foolishness for a few more seconds before he pushes himself up to sitting. He wasn't expecting Asuma so soon, especially so early in the day. It hadn't been very long since their last check in, and Shikamaru wasn't expecting him for another month at least. 

Coming early spelled bad news. 

"It's a hickey, Isamu, you aren't that stupid," he says, rubbing at his eyes with the heels of his hands. 

Isamu gives him her best skeptical look. Shikamaru ignores it and forces himself to his feet. 

"You don't get hickies, Shiromaru," Isamu needles eyes narrowed. She folds her arms across her chest, not bothering to turn away while he shuffles himself into clothes that are suitable for the light of day. "I saw you and Sakura-san disappear last night. She was holding her throat - ,"

Shikamaru runs his fingers through his hair, not bothering to comb it or to put it up. He leaves his earrings out, rubs a little bit of foundation over the holes on his ears where the jewelry usually goes. It's gotten longer than it was when he first left. It came down over his shoulders. If Sakura had been discreet, he could have used it to cover the hickey. 

He uses a little bit of foundation to at least make the bruise look less aggressive.

"The girls owe me so much money," Isamu says, grinning. She claps her hands and Shikamaru rolls his eyes. "I knew it'd be you. Or Chinatsu. She likes girls with green eyes."

"Where's Yoroi?" Shikamaru asks, heading for his door. Isamu rolls up to her feet and follows him out of his room. 

"He's in the back like usual," Isamu replies, flipping her hair over her shoulder. "Make sure you're quiet. Sasuke's out there practicing his flute and you know he gets."

"Yeah, yeah," Shikamaru mumbles, wishing for breakfast. "What a drag."

Isamu bumps her hip against his before they part ways. Shikamaru heads outside, squinting at the early morning light. When his eyes land on Asuma, his sensei is valiantly ignoring Uyeda, puffing away on a cigarette. 

Shikamaru approaches, arms folded across his chest. He looks down at Uyeda, who looks up at him with a sweet smile on his face. 

"Scram," Shikamaru says, jerking his chin sharply. 

" _Shirooo_ ," Uyeda whines, "why don't you want to share?"

"Because I don't like you," Shikamaru says. "Now beat it. You're wasting Yoroi-san's time. Get your own private clients."

Uyeda's eyes narrow meanly, but his arms slowly retract from Asuma's shoulders. He runs his fingers slowly over the corded muscle on either side of Asuma's neck, winking at the older man as he goes. 

Asuma looks at him sheepishly as Shikamaru sits down, but Shikamaru waves a hand. He waits, hand still outstretched, and Asuma provides. He slides the smoke neatly between Shikamaru's fingers and lights it when Shikamaru lifts it to his mouth. 

He sucks in the smoke, letting it settle him. He shuts his eyes as the cigarette soothes his rattled nerves. When he doesn't hear the sound of the shogi board being set up, he opens his eyes. 

"Something wrong, Yoroi?" 

Asuma doesn't light a cigarette. Instead, he sticks a toothpick between his teeth and chews on it. He looks an unfortunate amount like Shiranui. 

"I'm not here to talk about me, Shiromaru," he replies. "I'm here to talk about you."

Shikamaru nods, still a little on edge. 

"I made a friend."

Asuma lifts an eyebrow and gestures broadly at Shikamaru's throat. 

"A good one?" he asks. 

Shikamaru rolls his eyes. He doesn't usually allow himself to be marked, and if it does happen, he's sure to cover it up more effectively than he has today. 

"Her name is Sakuya," he says. Even a single syllable was enough for a code name. Shiromaru was a silly name for him, and Sakuya didn't fit Sakura exactly. But it was enough to protect her should all of this fall through. "She wants to be of service." 

"Oh?" Asuma asks. "In what way?"

Shikamaru tips ash over the edge of the verandah. 

"She's quite fond of your son."

She was agreeing to help liberate Sasuke. 

Asuma's eyebrows lift, and he folds his arms tightly across his chest. 

"That's new," Asuma says. "He isn't very popular."

Why are you talking about Sasuke? 

Shikamaru shrugs. 

"Trick of the light," Shikamaru muses, shrugging a shoulder. "It could make anyone look attractive."

Asuma's gaze turns severe, but Shikamaru doesn't flinch underneath the weight of it.

"And you trust her around him?" Asuma asks. "You're very protective."

Shikamaru nods. 

"Her mother?" he asks. "You know her. Fine woman called Sumire. Sakuya ended up here after her mother died."

Asuma's eyes widen imperceptibly. Asuma was also, as Ino liked to say, a huge nerd loser. And he was closer to the daimyo than any Konoha shinobi. Of course he knew who Hōjō Sumire was. Of course he knew who Hōjō Sakura was.

"She's hoping to find a job after this one. I told her we might be able to help her," Shikamaru says. 

Asuma tugs his toothpick out of his mouth and twirls it between his fingers. 

"I'm sure we could work something out," Asuma muses. "Provided the missus finds out what she needs to know about who's stealing my time. You think she could help?"

Shikamaru nods. 

"She's Sumire's daughter," he replies. "She's good at what she does."

Asuma doesn't seem to like this development, if the way he fiddles with his toothpick is any indication. Shikamaru lets the sound of Sasuke's flute practice hang over and around them as Asuma chews over the information. 

After a few more moments, Asuma sighs and says, "Whatever you think is best."

Shikamaru smiles and takes another drag off his cigarette. 

"I'm thinking you oughta offer her a place at the house."

Asuma's brows raise. Making samurai a contractor was one thing. Offering Sakura shinobi status was something else entirely.

"We'll see," Asuma says hesitantly. "Is there any other news other than this friend of yours, Sakuya?"

Shikamaru sticks his cigarette back into his mouth. 

As much as he hates to say it, there haven't been any new developments since the last time Asuma checked in. He hasn't been able to send back any decent information to Uchiha Mikoto, or at least not anything that would be helpful. He was aware that she and the Genzaikage had been friends as young women, growing close when Uzumaki Kushina was wooing the Yondaime into leaving Konoha for Uzushio.

Mikoto had advised him against getting Naruto and by proxy, Uzushio involved. They were already funneling money in through Kumo, and Sasuke's rescue had to be as under wraps as humanly possible.

Other than Naruto's foolish infatuation with Sasuke (and Sasuke's almost painfully obvious reciprocations), there wasn't anything to report. There were no updates on the situation with Sasuke's patron. Shikamaru knew his guess was good, but he had no way of solidifying his hunch until the man actually showed up. 

He was stuck at a standstill, and that infuriated him. What good was it, to have Sakura on his side, to have the Uzumaki in the wings in case he needed back up, if the man he was trying to hunt down and expose never showed up?

Long term missions were hard work, especially undercover. Ino had warned him, had wanted to go in his stead. With her clan techniques, she would have been perfect for this. She could have invaded Sasuke's mind, or Hanako's, and dragged a face and a name out in a heartbeat. 

But they sent Shikamaru instead. He was more subtle. His clan techniques were more subtle than Ino's. His looks were less eye catching. There weren't many blondes in Fire Country. One being at the teahouse would be a crowd favorite, an eye catching beauty that would rarely have time to herself. 

Brown haired men with dark eyes were a dime a dozen. And Shikamaru was clever. The smartest in his year. He wasn't a Jounin for nothing. He had undergone extra training with the Yamanaka. His mother had given him a series of pointers from her years in Black Ops before she retired to bear the Nara heir. 

He had been prepared for everything. And besides that, Shikamaru was typically a patient person. All of this waiting has been different in practice than in theory. 

He was getting antsy. He wnated out. Wanted to get Sasuke out. He knew he had the right answer to the equation at hand, but nobody was putting the formula in front of him, so he couldn't punch in the numbers. 

"I - ," he begins, tugging his cigarette out of his mouth. "No. There's nothing else to - ,"

The sound of Sasuke's flute practice titters abruptly into silence. He feels the moment when Asuma smothers his chakra signature so thoroughly, even a finely trained shinobi would only think he was a squirrel. 

"What is it?" Shikamaru asks, immediately on edge. "What's wrong?"

Asuma's face betrays nothing. Suddenly, Shikamaru is absurdly grateful that Asuma always comes in civilian clothes, and sometimes in a slight henge. Only a few things about him were different; the curve of his jaw, the length of his hair, the cut of his beard. Unrecognizable when they all added up. 

If he was that stiff, it only meant it was because there was someone here who would recognize them. 

Shiamaru's brain flies off the handle, thinking who on earth could be out here and what for. There were plenty of brothels between here and Konoha. What was out here except for Fukiage? 

"In the gazebo," Asuma says, lifting his hand. "Turn your head slowly, like I'm pointing something out to you."

He points at something just over Shikamaru's shoulder. He takes his cigarette out from his mouth, resting his wrist on his knee. He turns his head slowly. At this angle, it looks like Asuma is pointing out Sasuke, which was common enough. 

What isn't common, is the man that Sasuke is with.

The tight chin scar. The covered eye. The pale white garments and the black-as-night hair. One hand on a cane, the other resting possessively on the secondborn Uchiha's shoulder. 

Shimura Danzou. 

It’s very rare that Shikamaru hates being right.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter is the reason for the implied rape/non-con tag. see notes at the end of the chapter for more details.

Sakura can feel the difference in the teahouse. 

Usually, it's easy to tell where a sour mood comes from. Petty squabbles can put off every flower that called Fukiage home. Stolen jewelry, a dollop of lip color scooped out to ruin the whole tin. But this is worse. 

It's more somber. Colder. Like a heavy weight has settled on the shoulders of the teahouse as a whole. Even the men look more pensive, their hands lingering at the hilts of their blades more than they ought to. It puts Sakura on edge. 

The only person who seems capable of keeping their cool is Hanako. She doesn't seem even remotely bothered, counting her money and balancing the finances of her establishment. She, and Chinatsu, the red haired empress, hold their shoulders high, and meet the night head on. 

Sakura has dealt with worse. Has handled corpses. She's sure that Nobu and the other men have as well. She knows for a fact now, that Shikamaru has. Or at least she can guess. She goes through the motions, easy as they are. Pats down patrons at the front, does rounds on the inside. She has a brief break for a drink of water and pops a fruit drop in her mouth. It'll keep her from grinding her jaw. 

She's kept eyes on Shikamaru all night, but he's been more attentive than usual. His own patrons have kept him very busy, and all his focus has been on his shogi games or on the rim of his cup of water. It's almost like he's trying not to stare at something. 

She notices then, that Sasuke isn't in the room, entertaining. 

Usually, the whole room revolves around him. He's so thoroughly untouchable that he usually draws a crowd, always sitting underneath one of the red lanterns that make him glow that lovely way they do. And there's no Naruto at his side; no, he's been drawn away for whatever business he has going on in Konoha with his family.

Sasuke is not on his throne. And that makes Sakura pause. Makes her watch the way Shikamaru seems almost obsessively absorbed in his game. Sasuke is gone, when Sasuke is never gone. He's been in the back rooms all night, entertaining there. 

Something in his absence, in the way the whole of the teahouse seems to hold its breath makes Sakura's palms sweaty. She wants to grab onto the hilt of her own blade, wants to use that to steady herself. 

Battle calm is one thing, but this heavy tension is different. Sakura knows the way waiting feels, when you're anticipating bloodshed. There, in those moments, there is a constant knowing that no matter how much of your own blood is spilled, you will let blood in return. 

There is no feeling that Sakura will let blood tonight. She will not be the one drawing her blade to attack. She will be the one impaled. 

* * *

There are awful noises coming from the back. Sakura is on duty and she feels as though she may break the hilt of her mother's sword with the strength of her grip. Something doesn't _feel_ quite right. What bothers her more is that she can't put her finger on what exactly it is. 

She stalks the halls, her feet silent as she can make them. There are none of the typical lovemaking, fucking sounds. It's quiet. Despite Chinatsu's best efforts, despite Shikamaru's more aggressive interest, the mood in the teahouse has penetrated the only space where there is always noise. Did the patrons feel the tension in the slender shoulders of the flowers that entertained them?

No. Sakura knew that was foolish. Patrons were there for a product. The product was sex. For some, it was conversation, or attention. For the others, it was a pair of warm thighs, or the sheen if a spit slicked lip. 

But what would keep them from the back rooms? The flowers had a measure of authority in turning down clients, but that was as costly to them as it was to Hanako. Not all of them would turn every patron away; a strike of that kind didn't make sense, at least not at present. It must have been something keeping the patrons away. 

It couldn't be for lack of interest. Or lack of funds, really. No one came to a place like Fukiage without enough coin to pay for their drink, at the very least. 

Her feet stall outside of a door at the end of the hall, the largest one by far, and absolutely the most expensive. She can hear grunting, and something muffled. Low, wounded sounds, bitten off and hushed. Sakura's blood goes cold. 

Maybe it wasn't a matter of no one _wanting_ to pay their way. Maybe it was a matter of someone else making sure the rest of the patrons _couldn't_. 

She hears the sound of flesh slapping against flesh, the rolling noise of someone seeking and finding their pleasure. But that little  _something_ in the back of her head won't leave her be. The flowers of Fukiage were never so quiet. They needed to be just loud enough that a guard passing by could hear their safeword. Even the quietest of the flowers made more noise than whoever was muffling their voice. 

Sakura tries to run it through her head, who it could be. She's pretty sure she's heard everyone in the teahouse fuck before. She hasn't had to pull too many people out of their back rooms. Nobu, somehow gets saddled with that the most. There's a good amount of ribbing about that, the rest of the guards finding it funny, Sakura included. 

There isn't anything funny about it, though now. Because Sakura knows that everyone is out in the entertaining rooms right now.There are only a few sick upstairs, only three; Hiei, Kyoka, and Wamu. She did headcounts when the flowers came down the stairs. 

The only person she hadn't seen then, and hadn't seen all night was Sasuke. 

Her mouth opens, but she can't make herself suck in a gasp. She breathes. Shuts her eyes. Listens. It sounds like - What does it sound like - ?

Muffled, not from a face being pushed into a pillow, not sounds being swallowed on themselves by a full mouth. Not hidden in the back of the hand, or whimpered out around bitten flesh. No.  _No._

"A gag," she breathes. 

She slides the door open with such force it slams hard against the wall. The sight within makes her stomach turn. 

Sasuke is there, just as she expected, his throat a wash of dark purple welts and gently bleeding bite marks. He's entirely naked, the usual finery of his kimonos, the best ones in the whole of the teahouse, are bunched on the floor. Even from here, Sakura can tell he wasn't undressed; the fabric was cut off of him. 

He's covered in a sheen of sweat and trembling, on his knees, his face pressed into the hard floor. His eyes are screwed shut, and he's drawn taut as a bowstring, every curve of him alight with the same tension that has drowned the teahouse. Sasuke is so tense he looks like he's about to snap, even around the large man that is - is  _still_ -

Sakura can see he's gagged. But the burly man above him isn't who catches her attention. He's slowed down like a dog in a rut, confused at the interruption. No, Sakura only has eyes for the man in the corner, set up on a soft, lush red cushion. His face is heavily bandaged, only one sunken eye peering at the proceedings. 

The gaze of that black eye tracks to Sakura. It goes from politely disinterested to calculating from one blink to the next. 

"You will have to excuse me," Sakura says, finding her voice lodged in her throat. 

There is something terrible about this man. Something heavy and oppressive sitting inside of him. She can't tell if it's because he's stronger than he looks, or if it's because he's so clearly the one in control here. The man inside of Sasuke isn't anyone special, that much is clear. She's seen him around before, skirting the room when Naruto was occupying Sasuke's time, showing off his Uzushio money and a death glare that sent any other interested parties back across the room. 

"Gags are not permitted," Sakura continues, pressing the words out. 

The man inside Sasuke narrows his eyes and opens his mouth to say something, but the man in the corner raises his hand. 

"Of course," he says. 

"I'm afraid I will have to retrieve my charge for the night," Sakura says. "You will have to pay a fine with Hanako-san for what you have done, and you must leave. Immediately."

The man in Sasuke turns his head to the man in the corner, visibly displeased. The man in the corner nods his head, and Sasuke's patron scowls. He pulls out with no patience, no tenderness, and Sasuke slumps to the floor. 

Sakura is on him at once, lifting the torn remnants of his kimono. The long sheafs of fabric will do little to cover him, but it's better than leaving him naked. 

Helping him to his feet is difficult; he flinches when she touches him, but Sakura keeps her hands gentle. She coaxes him to his feet, well aware that both men in the room are watching them. Sakura covers Sasuke up best that she can, and when she's finished, she tears the gag out of his mouth with as much force as she can without hurting him. 

"Good evening," she says, voice low as she exits the room. 

Sasuke says no such thing. But the man with the chin scar, he gives them a smile. 

"Good evening," he says. 

Sakura shuts the door behind them. Sasuke leans heavily into her side, his dark eyes cast on the ground. 

"He won't pay," Sasuke murmurs, his arm around Sakura's shoulders, her arm around his waist. "Hanako won't make him." 

She realizes then, from how hoarse he sounds, that he wasn't grunting or moaning or hissing in pain. Sasuke's voice is _wrecked._ Hollow and hoarse, like even speaking as quietly as he is now pains him. Sasuke had been screaming behind that gag. 

Sakura bites her tongue and just focuses on trying to get him up the stairs. 

"I know," she murmurs. "Better than you realize."

* * *

Getting him into the bathtub is difficult. Sasuke had trembled on the way up the stairs. He was shaking almost violently, his feet sometimes not quite catching a step. She has to hold him up, almost thinks of just lifting him and carrying him to the tub herself. 

They pass Rokuro on the way from the back rooms to the main staircase. His eyes only widen a fraction, but his gaze doesn't linger overmuch on Sasuke. Instead, his eyes go grave when he looks at Sakura. 

She brushes it off; men looking at her funny isn't the strangest thing that's ever happened to her. 

When she manages to get Sasuke into the bathroom, she locks the door behind her and goes to fill the tub. Sasuke's trembling shifts subtly from a man shaking in pain to one shaking in anger. 

"I don't need your help," he spits, hoarse voice going nasty, savage. 

Sakura ignores him. She runs him a bath in the Western style tub. She makes sure it's only slightly warmer than the heat of her own skin. She putters around, looking for bath salts. She isn't sure what's medicinal or not. One has 'epsom and sea salts' handwritten on the top, so she unscrews it and dumps in two handfuls. 

"You don't know what you've just gotten yourself into," Sasuke snaps, shoulders shaking. 

He looks like a child. Bound tightly in the remnants of his shredded kimono, his black eyes flickering between their natural coal and the fierce crimson of the Copy Wheel Eye. Sakura doesn't look him in the face. She swirls her hand in the slowly filling tub, dissolving the salts as the water fills the bath. 

"You're going to get fired. You're going to get sent back to whatever shithole spat you out," he says. "You fucking  _idiot_. I guess nobody told you anything. That's just how things are done here, when it comes to _me_."

His voice cracks at that. Sakura turns her head and looks at him. He's staring at the floor. 

"There was only a vacancy here because Jūgo tried the same shit you just pulled."

Sakura says nothing. She never had found out the name of the man that had been here before her, the one whose post she filled. 

"Danzou had him fucking deported," Sasuke hisses. "He was a  _refugee_ and Danzou got him sent back for trying to help me." 

Sasuke looks up, his eyes red. There's a wash of blood at his throat from where he was bitten, and Sakura can see clearly over the expanse of his body that other bruises are forming. There are tears in his eyes. 

"This happens every single time someone tries to help me," he says, hiccuping as he forces the words out. "You goddamn  _idiot."_

Sakura stands and pulls back her sleeve so that she can turn off the faucet. 

"Get in the bathtub, Sasuke." 

He stares at her. Like he wants to say something more, like he wants to fight her on it. Sakura moves to the left and turns her face, gives him a measure of privacy to get naked again. She makes it clear in her body language that she doesn't intend to leave him here by himself. 

Sasuke sucks in a breath and it shudders its way through him. He walks past Sakura, shedding his torn clothing as he goes, and sinks into the tub. Sakura sighs. She brings up one hand to pinch the bridge of her nose, trying to breathe the way her mother taught her to calm herself down. But when she was holding Sasuke up, she must have brushed his neck, because his blood is smeared on her fingertips. 

She bucks hard, forces her hand away from her face. Sakura looks around, finds a stack of wash rags, and lifts the nearest one. She walks around the tub and sits on her knees behind Sasuke. She dips the rag in the water to soak it. She puts one hand on Sasuke's shoulder, and doesn't startle when he flinches. She leaves her hand there, but she doesn't move him. She waits until he inches forward and bares his back to her. 

Slowly, and just like that, she cleans him up. 

"Where's your family, Sasuke?" 

He stiffens under her touch, but he doesn't pull away from her. 

"I don't know," he murmurs. "Where's yours?" 

Sakura swallows. She could have anticipated that he was going to be difficult. She doesn't know why she's so surprised. She huffs out a breath and wipes gently at the dried blood on Sasuke's throat, at the round bite marks on his shoulderblades. 

"My mother was murdered," she replies, clucking her tongue. "I avenged her death, and my father sent me away so my grandfather wouldn't cut my head off." 

"Oh."

She stifles a smile. It's a little grim, but if she can't laugh at it, she's well aware it'll kill her. 

"They're in Konohagakure," Sasuke says. He waits until Sakura's finished washing his throat and back, until she's moved on to slowly washing his arms. "I don't remember much. Danzou brought me to Fukiage when I was six." 

Sakura swallows hard. It's as much as she should have expected. Other children were at least aware of what was happening to them, when they were given to teahouses or loaned out to other families to work their land. But Sasuke hadn't had any such arrangement. He had only been taken. 

"I asked about your family, Sasuke," she says, keeping her voice pitched low. "Not about him."

Sasuke shakes his head, his chin on his knees, his long forelocks dipping into the soft grey-green water. 

"I don't - ,"

"Your mother," she explains. "My mother's name was Sumire. She had purple hair and blue eyes. One of my swords was hers. She named me Konohasakuya, but my grandfather changed it when I was still a baby."

Sasuke snorts, and Sakura is pretty sure he rolls his eyes. 

"I was named - ," his voice falters, but Sakura says nothing. He starts again in his own time. "I was named after my father's teacher, Sarutobi Sasuke. I remember that." 

"What was your father's name?" 

"Fugaku."

Sakura notices the way he doesn't give her his family name. His  _clan_ name. She wonders if he even knows, if it would even make sense to him now. Sakura knows Sasuke as a sex worker, as a brat, as a person desperate to escape his situation without tools to make that escape possible. 

But she's also a Hōjō. If Sasuke asked for the swords on her hip, Sakura would give them over to him in a heartbeat. There had been good trade between their families once, a few Sharingan-less cousins intermarrying with her family long before she was born. 

She had no fealty to swear to him other than that of another child whose mother was stolen. No real fealty, now that she could not ally herself under her grandfather's name. 

"Your mother's name?" she asks. 

"Mikoto," Sasuke replies. "She was beautiful. The most beautiful woman in the world. My aunts always said my brother looked just like her, and he kept his hair long because he wanted to keep looking like her."

"What is your brother called?"

Sasuke's breath hitches. Sakura scrubs gently at his armpits. 

"Itachi," he says. "He - I - ,"

He silences himself with a hand on his mouth, quiets the sound of his sobbing. It's the loudest thing in the room. Sakura washes him through it, makes no noise to encourage him or to keep him away from the topic. 

Sasuke cries. He weeps like he's never wept before, like the weight of his loss is not something he allows himself to linger on for fear he will drown under the weight of it. She wonders how close he must have been to this Jūgo, for his forced departure to have convinced Sasuke that trusting others was foolish. 

Sakura doesn't need answers. She knows that this man, Danzou, he is not the one who touches Sasuke. He pays other men to rape him, and he watches. A power play, if Sakura's ever seen one, and Sakura has seen many in her short life. This is how he further destroys the Uchiha for whatever transgression they had done unto him. Stealing their secondborn son, because the secondborn is always the son born of love. Spiriting him away, and keeping him under a financial thumb so massive, Sasuke would have to eat, sleep, and die on his back to pay his way out on his own. 

Danzou paid Hanako handsomely to make sure no one else touched Sasuke between his visits. It was why no one else was permitted in the back rooms when Danzou was there. His checks were the ones that paid for Sasuke's gorgeous garments, his flute lessons wherever he had procured them, his soft skin, his carefully maintained hair. 

Danzou paid Hanako to keep Sasuke prisoner. And every once in a while, whenever Danzou saw fit, he came down to Fukiage to remind Sasuke why he couldn't buy his way out of the system, and what would happen to him if he tried. What he had to lose if he forgot how benevolent Danzou was. What was one man you didn't want touching you compared to the hundreds that the other flowers had to see month by month, just to make sure they had enough money to pay for their own beds at Fukiage? 

Sasuke had been young when he was taken. Too young to know intimately the shinobi arts. Too young to learn how to run. How to find his way back home. And whoever had been keeping tabs on him since then in the teahouse assuredly kept him away from any information that would help him figure out how. 

Jūgo was probably the only kind face Sasuke had seen in years. In more than a decade. Shikamaru didn't speak with him overmuch because of his mission. Of course Sasuke had been livid when Sakura had turned up. She had left him alone for the most part, but she was respectful, usually. And she liked Naruto, and Sasuke liked Naruto, so that was a mark in her favor. 

She had watched them kiss and had said nothing to Hanako. That couldn't have escaped Sasuke's notice. Of course he was livid she had interrupted what must have been routine for him. Sasuke just had to survive a handful of nights out of the year, and then he was fine. 

He'd probably never had someone like Naruto before. Someone he picked because he wanted to. Had he been too scared to before? Or had he never seen the point, because there was no way Naruto had enough money to buy him out from under Danzou's thumb? 

Sakura bites her lips together and carefully places her hand on Sasuke's back. He doesn't flinch. In fact, he leans back the barest bit into the touch. Sakura presses forward and wraps her arms around his shoulders, and pulls his back into her breast. 

She hugs him like that. His hands scrabble to her arms, just to hold on. He sobs until he's finished, and Sakura holds him, even as the water dampens her clothes. Even as the steam in the bathroom disappears. Even as the water in the tub goes cold, she holds onto him. 

She mouths the words against his temple, and she doesn't care if anyone hears. She swears it to herself, on Sasuke's blood still swirling in the bath water that surrounds him. 

" _I am going to get you out of here_."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sakura recognizes the sound of someone trying to make noise behind a gag and barges in on danzou watching an unnamed patron rape sasuke. there's no explicit detail because of sakura's own refusal to fully put words into what she's just witnessed, but she immediately removes sasuke from the situation.


	8. Chapter 8

She's toweling Sasuke's hair off when Shikamaru knocks on the door. He pokes his head into the bathroom, and tries not to let the image that greets him shock him out of his skin. 

Sasuke isn't a people person. He's rather like a cat. He decides when to come to you, not the other way around. Sakura gently drying his hair, murmuring what must be a lullaby to him is the softest Shikamaru has ever seen Sasuke, who relies heavily on his awful attitude to protect himself from further disappointment. 

Sakura's gaze shifts to the opening door only a few moments before Sasuke's do. Their attention is a mark towards both of their favors; Sakura was shinobi alert, and clearly Sasuke's early Uchiha training hadn't been fucked entirely out of him. 

"Close the door," Sakura snaps. "You're letting out the warm." 

Shikamaru snickers, but does as he's told. 

"There is no warm," he drawls as he shuts the door behind him. He wishes absently for a lock, but after a few attempted suicides, Hanako had them all done away with. The flowers didn't deserve privacy. "There's no steam in here anymore. You've been in too long."

Sakura purses her lips, taking the hint for what it is. Her absence has been noticed, and so has Sasuke's. 

Shikamaru hadn't seen the two of them leave, but he kept tabs on the shadows of every important person that stepped in and out of Fukiage. He knew the subtle curve of Sakura's shadow, and the sharp edges of Sasuke's hair. When the two of them fled the back rooms, Shikamaru knew about it. 

He had tried keeping tabs on Danzou, but had thought it more prudent to behave as if the man didn't interest him at all. It was clear enough from what he saw with Asuma that the Konoha elder was only there for Sasuke, and Shikamaru was known in the teahouse to not bark up trees he couldn't climb. He left that kind of behavior to Uyeda and the other more desperate flowers who didn't know how to cultivate decent images for themselves. 

"You'll have to pardon our quick exit," Sakura says, settling the wet towel around Sasuke's shoulders while she reaches for a brush. 

She starts brushing his hair from the ends and Shikamaru can already tell that Sasuke will look like a poodle when she's finished. His typical styling made the soft curl to his hair appear sharper. 

"I will?" Shikamaru asks. 

Sakura nods firmly. Sasuke says nothing. Shikamaru sighs heavily through his nose and crosses the bathroom to sit on the edge of the bathtub, just behind the sink where Sakura has sat Sasuke down on a stool to brush out his hair. 

"Do you know who that man was?"

Sasuke looks up, meeting Shikamaru's eyes in the mirror. Sakura doesn't bother and sticks with the task of taming Sasuke's hair. 

"The rapist?" she asks, spitting knives, "Or the one who sat back and watched?" 

"The one who sat back and watched." 

"His name is Shimura Danzou," Sasuke says, speaking up for the first time since Shikamaru's been in the room. His voice is honed with an undercurrent of mistrust. And really, Shikamaru can't blame him. "What the fuck do you know about him?" 

Shikamaru leans his elbows forward on his knees and scratches the back of his head. What a goddamn fucking drag. 

"Twenty years ago," he begins, "when our generation was born, the half of the Kyuubi sealed in the Konoha jinchuuriki was transferred from Uzumaki Mito to her granddaughter, Senju Tsunade. The transfer was interrupted, leading the Kyuubi to destroy over half of the village, leading to a thirty percent reduction in the shinobi population, and a fifty percent reduction in the civilian population." 

He hasn't gotten approval from Asuma to release state secrets like Tsunade's identity as the Kyuubi jinchuuriki, or the extent of the casualties that the Kyuubi's attack had dealt onto the village. But Sakura had witnessed a Konoha elder participating in the sexual abuse of the secondborn son of a Noble Clan. Spilling state secrets didn't really seem like such a big deal in retrospect. 

"The attack was officially blamed on the late arrival of Senju Tsunade's Uzumaki cousins, who were arriving to help ensure that the transfer went off without a hitch," he continues. "And it was a fair excuse. Uzumaki seal masters aiding in the transfer of the jinchuuriki is a proud tradition that reaffirms the bonds between Konohagakure and Uzushiogakure."

"But?" Sakura interrupts, snatching up a comb to help her work a knot out of Sasuke's hair. 

"But," Shikamaru explains, "plenty of fuinjutsu experts exist in Konoha. Ones taught by Uzushio masters. It didn't add up."

"Then someone in the village let the demon fox out," Sakura surmises. 

Shikamaru cocks a brow. Sakura had the senses of a shinobi, the paranoia one, and the kind of brazen lack of tact that reminded Shikamaru distinctly of Hatake Kakashi. 

"You're talking treason," Shikamaru says. 

Sakura looks up at Shikamaru in the mirror and snorts. 

"And you're a shinobi," she replies. "Treason is part of your job description."

Shikamaru shrugs, but concedes the point. 

"The unofficial story is that someone with the ability to manipulate jinchuuriki interrupted the process so that the transfer could not happen." 

Sakura's brows furrow, but Sasuke's black eyes flash. 

"Who could stop one of the great chakra demons?" she asks. "Their power is beyond human comprehension."

"Not entirely," Shikamaru says, rubbing the back of his neck. He looks at Sasuke, watches as the other man grinds his teeth until his jaw clicks. "Isn't that right, Sasuke?" 

"My family would  _never_ \- " 

"And they didn't," he interrupts, raising his hands in a show of mollification. It keeps Sasuke from shooting up in his seat and knocking the comb out of Sakura's hands. 

Sakura turns and looks between the two of them. 

"The Copy Wheel Eye can control the great chakra demons?" she asks. 

Shikamaru nods. 

"It was Uchiha Madara who first did it, when he used the Kyuubi to attack the village when it was still young. Only the Sharingan seems to be able to hypnotize the jinchuuriki into doing the wielder's bidding."

"So the Uchiha came under suspicion when the beast was freed," Sakura guesses. "With the other Uzumaki waylaid and unable to help, it would only take one pair of Copy Wheel Eyes to make havoc happen." 

"But they _didn't_."

Sasuke's voice brooks no argument. Shikamaru nods in agreement. 

"No Uchiha loyal to Konoha did it," he says. "But someone in the possession of a Sharingan eye could." 

Sasuke's eyes flash red, and this time, nothing can stop him from rushing to his feet. Bloodline theft was a heinous crime. Even if Sasuke knew nothing of his shinobi roots, he knew his Sharingan was a part of him. He would instinctively know the wrongness of such a theft. 

"Shimura Danzou was on a team with Uchiha Kagami when they were in their youth," Shikamaru says, rolling his shoulders. "On a mission during the Second War, Danzou returned, but Kagami did not. Killed in action." 

"He didn't come back with a corpse," Sakura breathes. 

Sasuke is  _seething._

"He didn't," Shikamaru confirms. 

Danzou's bloodline theft had been the piece of evidence Shisui and Itachi had been searching for, for ages. With Shisui buried under deep cover in ROOT and Itachi working regular ANBU rotations, it had been up to the two of them to find evidence of Danzou's crimes not only against the village and the Hokage seat as a whole, but against the Uchiha personally. 

"Why would he steal his teammate's eye?" Sakura asks. 

Shikamaru shrugs. 

"Same reason any shinobi does anything that batshit," he reasons. "Power. Danzou thinks the current Hokage's gone soft with age. Thinks he's been soft for years. Releasing the Kyuubi was supposed to draw attention to the fact that Sandaime-sama doesn't have the village as in control as he thinks he does." 

He watches the wheels turn in Sakura's mind, even as she reaches out a tender hand to stroke Sasuke's arm to calm him down. 

Danzou was aiming at a civil war. One that he would come out on top of. If he -purposely or not- inspired enough distrust in Sarutobi among the Noble Clans, he could move for a vote to unseat him, or at least for one to challenge Sarutobi for the hat. By discrediting the Uchiha and Sarutobi with the Kyuubi attack, Danzou had singlehandedly upended the clan power balance that currently held the village together. 

"Almost immediately after the Kyuubi attack, the Uchiha agreed to work with the Hokage to figure out if there was a traitor in their midst," Shikamaru says. "The Uchiha interrogated their own, doing their best to root out whoever might have been the perpetrator."

"There wasn't one to find," Sasuke hisses. He lets Sakura's fingers gently wrap around his arm, and run gently down until she's holding his hand. It's awfully tender, but Sasuke doesn't shake her off. 

"So they started looking deeper," Sakura hedges. Shikamaru nods. 

"And by then, guess who had been born?" 

"Your generation," she answers. 

Sasuke was a political kidnapping. Stolen by Danzou and ferreted out of the village to stop the Uchiha from continuing in their investigation of the Kyuubi attack, which only showed to draw further ire onto the family. 

"Another child from a Noble Clan had faced a similar attempted kidnapping at the same time," Shikamaru explains. "Bloodline theft was common in those times. Security was lax." 

"On purpose, I imagine," Sakura seethes. "How many children has this man stolen out of the village?" 

Shikamaru shrugs. Hinata's kidnapping had only been facilitated to keep the Hyūga in line, forcing Hiashi away from strengthening ties with other clans, and towards isolationism within the Hyūga compounds walls. Danzou hadn't had too much of an issue dressing up one of his ROOT shinobi as a Kumo one to stage the kidnapping. He had managed to get rid of Hiashi's brother and strongest supporter of positive Noble Clan relations when he was already mourning the death of his wife. 

He was awfully good at tearing families apart. 

"Enough," Shikamaru says. He reaches for the cigarette behind his ear and tucks it between his lips, then fishes for the book of matches he nicked off of a patron this evening. He strikes it off the bottom of his foot before he uses it to light his cigarette. 

"Sasuke's family was told not to look for him on pain of death," he says between the first few drags. "If the Uchiha left Sarutobi-sama's investigation, Sasuke lived. If they didn't, Sasuke didn't. Clearly, they didn't listen."

He can almost feel the moment when Sasuke's eyes widen.

"My family sent you?" 

He sounds as fragile as his hand looks in Sakura's. Shikamaru's never seen anyone born of shinobi look that close to shattering whole. 

"Your mom signs my checks," Shikamaru confirms. He leans back on the heels of his hands, puffing his lips around his cigarette. "The official story was that you wandered off as a child, and you were killed by a wild animal. A body was recovered and buried. Your mother didn't believe it was you."

He watches the way Sakura squeezes Sasuke's hand. The way Sasuke's whole body is tense, ready to leap or lean into Sakura for more of the comfort he seems hesitant to let himself have. 

"So how do we get him out?" Sakura asks, interrupting the silence. 

Shikamaru exhales smoke through his nostrils and taps his cigarette ash out into the still drying bathtub. He opens his mouth to speak, but Sasuke goes first. 

"What's my mother's name?" 

Shikamaru cocks a brow. 

"Mikoto."

"My father's?"

"Fugaku."

"My brother's."

"Itachi."

Sasuke bites the inside of his cheek so hard even Shikamaru can see it. 

"My brother's clay mask," he says, measuring his words so that his voice doesn't waver over them. He squeezes Sakura's pale hand so hard her knuckles stand out against her skin. "What kind of animal was painted on it?"

Shikamaru's eyebrows jump. Uchiha Itachi didn't seem the type to go around bragging that he was in ANBU, especially not to his little brother. Then again, little siblings were prone to go snooping where they weren't supposed to. Shikamaru had enough cousins to know that much was true. 

"Ah," he says, scratching his chin as he thinks. "A weasel, I think. A red one."

A fact Shikamaru only knew from the few meetings he had, had with Mikoto in private when Itachi was acting as her guard. The Uchiha were under heavy surveillance these days, and when Mikoto couldn't hack a casual meeting in public as Shikamaru's genjutsu tutor, then she had to meet him on the training grounds with her constant guard. And Shikamaru wasn't dumb enough to not guess the identity of the black haired, black-eyed, weasel-masked ANBU. 

 

Sasuke sucks in a slow, hard breath and flexes his other fist. 

"Alright," he says, his jaw clicking. "Alright."

Sakura wraps another arm around him before Sasuke even thinks to fight her, and she holds him, her gaze steady. 

"So how are we getting him out?" she asks. 

Shikamaru shakes his head. 

"I don't think he needs to be here for this conversation."

"I have every right," Sasuke snaps. 

"You aren't trained for espionage," Shikamaru returns. "You got cradle robbed to soon to learn anything useful."

"He oughta be a part of this, Shikamaru," Sakura says. "He knows Danzou better than anyone else. He's the closest one to him."

Shikamaru pinches the bridge of his nose and prepares for the fight that's coming. He shuffles through his plans in his mind and tries to find one that includes Sasuke without Sasuke's lack of field experience fucking all three of them over. Sakura was already hardly a safe bet, but at least she knew how to fight. Sasuke hadn't even been old enough to consciously activate his Sharingan before he was stolen from the village. 

"The only way to expose him for what he is, is to do exactly that," Shikamaru says. "Expose him." 

He lets his words hang in the air, watches color fade from Sasuke's face and rise to flush Sakura's. 

"Absolutely not," she says, her voice cracking like a whip. "No, Shikamaru.  _No."_

"My contact in Konoha is bringing the Godaime Hokage candidate on a tour through Fire Country. One of the stops he's arranged is here, in the daytime when Fukiage isn't active as a teahouse," Shikamaru explains. "I was planning on convincing Isamu to play a duet with Sasuke in the gardens so that he'll be seen by the incumbent Godaime and her guard."

"And you think Sasuke getting caught in bed with that  _fucker_ is a better idea?" 

 

"A handful of her guard will arrive a day in advance to run security," Shikamaru explains. "My contact is a guard to the daimyo and will be in attendance as well." 

Even if Sasuke was a child when he left, it's clear he understands the importance of this meeting. If the incumbent Godaime and the daimyo were in the same place at the same time, there would be no better opportunity to expose Danzou for what he was and to reveal that Sasuke's 'death' had been an orchestrated tragedy.

"If he's never met these people before, they won't recognize him," Sakura insists. 

"But they will recognize Danzou."

They both turn their heads to Sasuke, whose lips are pursed in a fine line. Shikamaru nods. 

"And they will recognize a Sharingan." 

"I said no, Shikamaru," Sakura presses, and inches herself in front of Sasuke, as if shielding him from Shikamaru's plan with her body. "It's not a good plan. We have to figure something else out."

"Just because Danzou pays to keep Sasuke in the teahouse doesn't mean that he's the one fucking him," Shikamaru returns. "If we can prove that Sasuke's an Uchiha and that he's been here against his will since childhood in the same day, then Danzou's in prison before he can even get his rocks off."

Sakura's face flushes with the extent of her rage and she shakes her head furiously. She snatches the cigarette from between his lips and tosses it in the bathtub to fizzle in a puddle of water by the drain. 

"If you're as smart as you say you are, you figure out another plan," she says, her green eyes flashing. "I'm not letting this happen - ,"

"It's not up to you."

Sasuke's gruff dismissal stalls some of her upset. Sakura looks like she's been stopped dead in her tracks. 

"Sasuke - ," 

He lets go of her hand abruptly as if to punctuate his point. Sakura sets her jaw like she's ready to argue the point, but Sasuke sidesteps her and stands in between the two of them. 

"It wouldn't be the worst thing I've done since I've been here," Sasuke says. "At least this time I'd be choosing it."

Sakura shakes her head, a soft sound of protest escaping her throat. She reaches for Sasuke again, manages to get her hands on his shoulders and turns him to face her. 

"This isn't any kind of choice," she says, voice soft and full of conviction. 

Sasuke swallows hard and shrugs out of her grasp. 

"Either way," he says. "It's still mine."

Shikamaru can tell by the way Sasuke stands that he doesn't like the plan. He doesn't like it much himself. Sending someone untrained into a honeypot mission was a surefire way to cause instant lifetime trauma. Sasuke hadn't gone through any kind of training to properly compartmentalize the horror that shinobi had to regularly endure to survive. He had only been a child, even by village standards when he had been stolen.

He already had years of being assaulted by random men while Danzou watched in silence. Years of being kept in Fukiage with no way out. And now the cause of his life of torment was the man he had to lay with in order to escape it all. 

It wasn't a pretty picture. Shikamaru hadn't led a great number of teams, but this is a bet he wouldn't even hedge on an actual shinobi with no honeypot experience. Sasuke was more or less a glorified civilian. 

"The Godaime will be here in three days," Shikamaru says, voice low and careful. "Her guard will be there before that. We need to keep Danzou in Fukiage. If he doesn't know she's coming, all the better. It would be safer for him to not try to leave, because he'll probably be seen by her or her entourage, or the daimyo's."

He watches Sasuke carefully and says, "We need to keep him busy." 

Sasuke nods slowly and this time, when Sakura reaches for his arm, he doesn't pull away. 

Shikamaru cracks his neck and bemoans the loss of his cigarette to the tub. 

"Alright then," he says. "Here's what we're going to do, and how we're going to do it."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> extended mito's lifetime and split up the kyuubi so that half of it is in uzushio and half of it is in tsunade, because i personally think tsunade was born to be a jinchuuriki. i just love crunching timelines.


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